It’s an amazing day!

“This is the day that the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24).

Be amazing today, my friend.

I always end these posts with that sentence.

Prior to that, I use about five hundred words to try to give you a few reasons for it.

Today, I want to start there.

Why?

Thanks for asking!

Here’s one ingredient to the secret sauce for living an amazing day: determine in advance to be amazing.

We’ve all had THOSE nights—the ones where sleep eludes us and a realization happens at some point during the night that we will not be prepared for what tomorrow holds because we are entering it exhausted.

It is so easy to preload a bad day!

It’s almost as if we expect to be cranky because we deserve—dadgummit—to be cranky!

And then—surprise, surprise—something goes wrong during the day and our preloaded expectations are validated. We knew it was going to be one of those days!

And it goes downhill from there.

Have you been there?

Be amazing.

Seriously?

Let me repeat the Bible verse I started with today: “This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.”

Ponder this:

“This is the day.” Today. The only day in which we have the option of living. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is not assured. Actually, tomorrow will never arrive, because when it does, it will be today.

“This is the day the Lord has made.” This is our reality. We did not make the sun come up this morning. We could not prevent the sun from coming up this morning. The fact that today exists is totally outside of our control or influence. How it all happened is beyond our comprehension. And our beliefs about how we got here and how this day got here do not in any way alter the reality of this day’s existence.

But our beliefs can change the way we approach it.

Today is either a cosmic coincidence or it exists for a reason. We can see today as something that has happened to us. We can see today as a gift granted to us. (I choose the latter).

“We will rejoice and be glad in it.” This is a conscious decision—a chosen response. And note that it is a response to the day with no mention of the particular circumstances.

There is a concept known as “locus of control” that refers to “the extent to which people feel that they have control over the events that influence their lives … If you believe that you have control over what happens, then you have what psychologists refer to as an internal locus of control.”

This is a bit of a simplification of the psychological concept, but I think it is helpful to understand that we may have little control over the circumstances of our lives, but we have great control over our ability to choose how we will respond to the circumstances.

“We WILL rejoice” (emphasis mine).

I choose to see this day as a gift from God. I choose to laugh. I choose to hope. I choose to encourage. I choose to bless. I choose to endure. I choose to love. I choose to be amazing.

Join me?

Be amazing today, my friend.