Kate Bowler believes the cultural pressure to be cheerful and optimistic at all times has taken a toll on our faith. But what if we could find better language than forced positivity to express our hopes and our anxieties? Kate’s new book, HAVE A BEAUTIFUL, TERRIBLE DAY! is packed with bite-sized reflections and action-steps to help you get through the day. Good days. Bad days. Totally mediocre ones. Written in a season of chronic pain, Bowler understands that every day can be an obstacle course. She encourages us to develop our capacity to feel the breadth of our experiences. The better we are at identifying our highs and lows, the more resilient we become. It’s a joy to welcome Kate to the farm’s table…

Guest Post by Kate Bowler

These are terrible days. These are beautiful days. Somehow both realities feel inseparable in our minds now. 

We have the sense that something bad might happen, and has already happened. When we read the headlines, we do not shake our heads. We nod. Yes, we think. Of course that would happen. 

Our moods seem tight and jittery. We worry about groceries and school shootings and airborne viruses. We worry about kids and parents and friends and whether this, whatever this is, is all we can expect. We worry about the heart-stopping events we have already endured and what will happen next. 

We worry about how we will get it all done. 

We worry about everything that can never be undone.

“How are you?” people ask us. 

“Anxious,” we might reply. 

But when the sun begins its nightly descent, instinctively, we cast our eyes to the horizon. We have the sense that something lovely will happen, and has already happened yesterday. We notice how the white glare of the sun behind starched clouds is pooling into oranges and deep reds, and our breath begins to slow. We nod.

Yes, we think.

This is also what happens. 

Our moods thaw into awe.

We marvel at good medicine, the invention of cheese dip, and the delightful mischief in our child’s eye no matter how old. We marvel at the intricacy of flowers and the ingenuity of cities built from steel and concrete. We cannot believe how much our parents can drive us bananas and our friends can make us laugh so hard that we need to find a wall to support ourselves.   

We find ourselves surrounded by the daily miracles of planets turning and stars blinking and people who hug us when we come through the door. 

“How are you?” people ask us.

“Grateful,” we might reply. 

We might feel awful or wonderful, but we are running out of those middle-of-the-road feelings…the more boring, hum-drum feelings of being unfazed by the world around us. We are no longer able to be carried along by the momentum of ordinary days unfolding into other ordinary days. Instead, we are lifted and carried by currents larger than us, taking us further and faster than we wanted to go. There are highs and lows, soaring views and stomach-clenching drops. 

This is the new way of being in the world, the sense of unpredictably and precipitously rising and falling. We are made of feathers. We are made of stone. 

“God, whatever is true about You had better be true now.“

Something you should know about me: I wrote this particular book now because I am in the midst of a dark season of pain. I have physical pain that ripples down my back and pelvis, up and down my legs, and crawls up my neck. It feels cold and loud. It feels like lightning delivered intravenously, washing over me in waves. 

I almost never talk about it, because I find pain difficult to describe and even more difficult to describe over and over again to people who love me and cannot help me. (I am not recommending this kind of inwardness, only confessing that I haven’t figured out another way.) So, rightly or wrongly, I don’t talk about pain, but I think about it on a thirty-second loop.

Driving, scrubbing dishes, doing laundry, talking to friends, taking meetings, answering email, talking on the phone. Some days the pain is so deafening that I forget what room I’m in. People are talking and I can’t quite make out the words. I worry that the look on my face will give away how far I have drifted from where they can reach me. I am lost to myself, given over to a body that is deeply indifferent about what I put on the calendar. 

But I discovered that for roughly an hour first thing in the morning, my brain was bright and clear. So I wrote these blessings and reflections. It was all I could do. I couldn’t research long-term history books (as I am often doing). I couldn’t write long-form stories because that, friends, takes hours and hours and I had only a short burst before my ability to think detonated. But I could say:

God, whatever is true about you had better be true now.

Today.

I could not wait until tomorrow to have long, luxurious thoughts about the Christian past and some hypothetically wonderful person I might become if I could only get my act together. Instead, if I wanted to pray or bless this day, I needed to be able to place my faith alongside my reality. And my reality is fear, pain, and fear of pain. 

“Blessed are we, the grateful, awake to this beautiful, terrible day.“

If you are anxious or worried about whether your life can also be beautiful, welcome. Me too. Thank you for joining me here. I can’t tell you how nice it is to have company when, otherwise, I would assume the social media lie that everyone is living a spectacular and effortless life drinking green smoothies somewhere, doing beachfront yoga or noodling around Europe, is true. 

What I want more than anything is to bless you and me right now, and feel the truth of our realities without letting reality itself overwhelm us. People often say, “FAITH NOT FEAR,” as if faithful people can’t be afraid. But we are afraid for so many reasons, many of them both reasonable and realistic. So let’s just settle that controversy now: we can be faithful and afraid at the same time. Like the Psalmist David, we too can live faithfully when afraid: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in You” (Ps. 56:3).

A few years ago, around Lent, I realized I didn’t have the right way to say, “Bless us in this new way of being.” So I started saying, “Have a beautiful, terrible day!” It made me laugh and it felt, well, honest. 

So here’s to us having beautiful, terrible days. And here’s a little blessing as we do:

Blessed are we, the anxious,

with eyes wide open to the lovely and the awful.

Blessed are we, the aware, 

knowing that the only sane thing to do in such a world

is to admit the fear that sits in our peripheral vision.

Blessed are we, the hopeful, 

eyes searching for the horizon, 

ready to meet the next miracle, the next surprise.

Yes, blessed are we, the grateful,

awake to this beautiful, terrible day.

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{ Our humble thanks to Convergent Books for their partnership in today’s devotional.}