Garfield, the comic strip cat has three basic recurring themes. He loves lasagna. He loves sleep. And he hates Mondays. Preach it, Brother Garfield! Right? I mean at the office, it’s a universal greeting, isn’t it? At the coffee pot, in the halls, in the parking lot, with each person that comes to your desk…it’s always the same, right? Not the lasagna part – but the Monday hating. It’s always some grunt of greeting followed some expression of hatred of Mondays. We reference how short the weekends are, and how we can’t believe it’s Monday again ALREADY!! We hate Mondays. We can’t wait to come up with new ways to gripe about Monday and the nasty, evil things it undoubtedly holds for us.
We have a weekend’s worth of emails to catch up on. We have voicemails from someone about something you did Friday…and who can remember what they did on Friday 30 minutes before quitting time?! I mean, c’mon! I was barely paying attention to it then…much less able to remember it on Monday morning. I mean, it’s Monday morning after all!! And more than that…there’s a WHOLE week ahead of us! Ugh!! FIVE FULL WORK DAYS in our immediate future. That’s another prime reason to loathe the beast that is “Monday morning” right there! All week lies out there ahead of you. Monday afternoon is even better than Monday morning simply because you have 4 hours under your belt, and quitting time Friday is that much closer.
You want more proof of the universal disdain for Mondays? Look at the number of songs written about how bad Mondays are. The Mamas and the Papas, The Carpenters, The Bangles (just to name the first three off the top of my head – although truthfully, that might be the whole list) all sing about how bad Monday is. The only two people who seem to like Monday are the NFL for Monday Night Football and Jimmy Buffett – and apparently Jimmy just hates brown L.A. haze more than Mondays, because he thinks “come Monday, it’ll be alright”. But for the rest of us, let’s face it…we walk into Monday morning like a dog being dragged into the vet’s office. Every muscle clenched as tight as we can clench them, and digging our claws into the floor as far as we can dig them, and STILL we’re being dragged into Monday morning. And honestly, we’d rather just take a beating with a stick than face a Monday morning.
But if there was ever a day of the week that we should come to work happy…and smiling…and dare I say whistling and dancing like a pack of fat, happy dwarves with corny names, it should be Monday mornings!! We’ve just come off of a Sunday, after all! We’ve shared some singing with fellow Christians. We’ve heard an uplifting sermon reminding us of God’s love. We’ve prayed in earnest for those we care about. We’ve dreamed together of how it will be when we all get to Heaven, God’s Family (to borrow a line). For me, I never feel more uplifted than Sunday after church. I never feel more assured that everything will be ok than Sunday after church. I never feel God’s presence with me more than I do Sunday after church. I never feel more excited to be a Christian in the midst of God’s creation than I do Sunday after church. I never feel more like screaming the Gospel from the mountain tops than I do Sunday after church. And I’ll spend all day singing a particularly uplifting song that we sang that morning. As a matter of fact, on this particular Monday morning as I’m writing this devotional, I spent all day yesterday singing “Beautiful Lamb”. I love that song, and it sums up so much of what Christianity means to me. But apparently it’s not joyful enough to keep me from plummeting from the Sunday morning mountaintops to the valleys of Monday mornings.
Listen for the Whisper that asks you if the turning of a clock from Sunday to Monday all it takes to rob us of our joy? And then ask yourself why that is. How deep-rooted is our joy in Christ if a simple little thing like a Monday morning is all that it takes to take that joy away from us? Hallelujah Christ arose…except Monday mornings, when I’m more put out by an email than I am overjoyed about my salvation. What’s wrong with that picture? Absolutely everything…that’s what’s wrong with that picture.
~Dwayne
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