I woke up Tuesday morning thinking about how tired I was. That wasn’t even fair, since I’d gotten seven hours of sleep. I stared at my phone and prayed I wouldn’t have to go anywhere today. Not long after that, I heard I would be doing school at home because of the snow. I gratefully pulled the covers back over my head, reset my alarm, and shut my eyes.

I woke up some time later to a text from my boss, telling me I was scheduled for that evening. Considering I’m still in training and only go in once a week, that wasn’t so bad really. But then the whispers came muttering, “When you start working for real, what’s going to happen to your free time?” At my old job, I worked so much all I wanted to do in my free time was sleep. But now was not the time for that. I shut that voice up and—well, I went back to sleep.

That was a cold day. I was wearing three layers of clothing and had the heater on 70. My roommate called me a Floridian. I agreed with her. But really, anyone should have seen that it was intolerably cold. The temperature was in the tiny numbers, and snow had turned the cars outside into puffy ghosts. It looked very pretty when it blew off the trees though, sort of how I imagined sylphs might look.

I didn’t want to turn the heater past 70, for the sake of the electric bill, and while layering clothing does wonders, it can be very uncomfortable. So I sat through the cold and wrote some things and read some things. On my lunch break, I read a Celtic fantasy book about elves spying on a drug dealer. Good book. The chapters did run on a bit, though.

Then it was back to work. I was building a website—yuck. Website-building makes me very angry if I’m not careful. It became very clear that this was too dangerous to do on my own today. I took a breather, ate some caramel-pretzel-chocolate stuff I made on Sunday, and stared at the dishes I forgot to wash last night.

It would be fun to cause a calamity right now, I thought. A calamity sounds good and loud and full of breakable possibilities. My coworkers at my last job used to wonder what I’d do in a rage room. I was very quiet and unemotional, you see. Now I wondered, as I ate more caramel-pretzel-chocolate stuff, what would I do in a rage room?

It was getting hot. I took off two layers and replaced my fleece-lined shirt with my tan trench coat that looked like the Tenth Doctor’s. The buttons were the only glaring difference. The collar itched the back of my neck, but it was a small price to pay for feeling epic. I sat back down and decided to write an article.

Now it is 3:30-something. I have just hissed at my roommate and made her run into the bathroom. I say website-building is terrible. My teeth chatter with anger just thinking about it. She says it’s easy. Article! Must right write article. I don’t know how I mixed up right and write there, but I’ll keep it in. It’s a good reminder of my fallibility. 

“Write, OK,” I say to God. “I’m gonna sit here and write out my feelings, ’cause I have a lot of them and they’re pretty annoying, and I’m gonna drain myself out. And then I’m gonna listen to this podcast thing for school and wash dishes while I do it.”

So here I am, righting an article and listening to a playlist with twenty different versions of the I’m the Doctor theme. I’m not exactly drained, but the feelings have gone away to sulk. I just paused to check my email and was reminded I have a presentation on Friday. Pardon me while I defenestrate myself. 

Yaaaaaaah.

I’m back. The window was on ground level. 

I don’t suppose I’m the only one with days like these? They’re not even always bad, but the emotions are high and running wild. The mind starts seeing the downside of things—it’s too cold, my clothes are uncomfortable, I’m really frustrated. There were good things too, like the snow blowing off the trees, eating caramel-pretzel-chocolate stuff, and enjoying my trench coat, but that’s not where my focus was.

Theory: a good portion of our daily angst comes from being too much and not enough of a toddler. A toddler is never still, and yet despite how many times a toddler asks, “Why?” they are usually pretty secure in their knowledge that food, clothes, and reactions are going to continue coming on a regular basis. This is a Biblically-based theory: Yeshua says we should be like children in our faith, while in one of his letters Paul says we need to move past milk and get to the solid food of maturity in Messiah.

Being still in this case is more of a mental stillness. We tend to behave like Gandalf at the Moria-gate, going over the problem until there’s nothing to do but throw down our hats and sit in silence. Today, I focused more on my bad feelings instead of noticing all the ways God was blessing me. Sometimes you just need to sit and look all pouty with your floppy wizard hat until a hobbit or the Holy Spirit comes along and says, “Hey, what about this?”

Our world is not designed for peace. True stillness comes only from God, and from that stillness comes knowing. If you trust Him enough to be still, everything will drop off like grease from a pan, and suddenly you’ll see that pan was shiny all along.