If you wake up feeling cranky - you can choose to give your wife the silent treatment and make her feel like crap, or, you can choose to close your eyes, say a little prayer of thanks that you have another day and smile your way through breakfast.
If your boss yells at you and makes you feel unappreciated - you can choose to yell back at him and jeopardize your job, or, you can let the tirade pass and resolve to do something good that he can't help but notice.
If the store clerk rings up your order incorrectly and asks for too much money - you can choose to be angry and call him incompetent, or, you can smile while you point out the problem and kindly ask him to ring it up correctly, then compliment him on being efficient in his corrective action.
If you get cut off in traffic by a young person texting on their phone - you can choose to pull up along side of them, give them the flying finger and question their human origins, or, you can take a deep breath, say a prayer that they put down the phone so that they don't get into an accident and then go on about your day without thinking any more about it.
The point is, there may be many things that come about in our day that have the potential to give us a really bad day. The thing God did for us that he didn't do for the lion, the buffalo or the stork is, he gave us the power to make choices, to choose how we would respond to situations. We can turn a potentially bad day into a good one just by making positive choices as situations come up during the day. Consciously decide to consider alternative responses when the gut reaction is to explode in anger or to wallow in 'poor me'.
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