This is your day--rejoice!

HAD I been shortchanged? The cashier insisted that she had handed me a ten-dollar bill. Finally, she discovered that she had mistakenly put it in the bag of groceries. ``This just isn't my day,'' she sighed. Like the cashier, we too may sometimes feel that we are wedged into a twenty-four-hour slot of ups and downs, personal loss and confusion. But we have an unfailing recourse, as the Psalmist did: ``The Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.'' 1 Every hour opens possibilities for good. Each moment can be seen to be governed by God's law of unbroken harmony. This isn't wishful thinking or naivet but practical truth. Holding to more spiritual views of our identity, place, and work, we realize that we don't necessarily depend on certain people or circumstances for our happiness, to ``make our day.'' In a very profound way our day is already made-- God-made and sustained. And because of God's impartial love this is true for everyone. But we need to realize this, to begin to trust in and perceive the reality of God's government, in order to experience it increasingly. Prayer helps us do this. So does the cultivation of greater purity and love for God and man. What is God's day like? In accord with God's nature, it must be timeless, boundless, eternal. It is without stops or starts. It doesn't change with the seasons. Peace, joy, wholeness, harmony, progress, characterize the divine days. Sin, sickness, or some other discord cannot forever cloud the spiritual fact that good, not evil, is supreme. God's day outshines the belief in a power opposed to Him, opposed to ever-present good. A friend, while praying to overcome a physical difficulty, decided to make a consecrated study of the Psalms. Late one night she read: ``The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.'' 2 She saw immediately that each night could only reveal to her more of the nature of God and of her spiritual identity in His likeness. Each day could only voice God's Word, the certainty of her God-given health and dominion. As a result of her clear perception of this truth, she was quickly healed. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, writes, ``Spiritual understanding, by which human conception, material sense, is separated from Truth, is the firmament.'' 3 And she writes elsewhere: ``The objects of time and sense disappear in the illumination of spiritual understanding, and Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded. This unfolding is God's day, and `there shall be no night there.' '' 4 Suffering has no legitimate standing in God's day. Under divine Providence disease has no authority. Dread has no entry in a day supported by God's grace, brimming with His benefits. A higher, spiritual concept of day moves us forward in right decisions and associations. Mourning the past, wasting the present, and fearing the future, fade in the radiance of a day committed to serving God. The Bible says of Christ Jesus, ``In the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.'' Might he not have been preparing for another day like the preceeding one--a day of many healing works? When Simon and those with him followed and found the Master, they said, ``All men seek for thee.'' 5 Who can measure the potential of a day paced to coincide with God's will? Troubles are sooner overcome in a day strengthened beforehand in quiet communion with God. To spiritual mindedness, each morning is synonymous with fresh revelation to be welcomed as one would a good friend. It's not so much what we get out of our day that satisfies as it is what we bring to it in more spirituality, integrity, joy. Moral and spiritual regeneration eliminates negativeness, apathy, purposeless hours. We can decide what kind of a day it is going to be even before we get up--God's great and wondrous day! Is today just another day? No--it's another chapter in the continuing love story of our Father's daily blessings already at hand. Gratitude helps us to recognize them here and now. Let's celebrate this day as a hymn says: ``This is the day the Lord hath made; / Be glad, give thanks, rejoice.'' 6 1 Psalms 42:8. 2 Psalms 19:1, 2. 3 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 505. 4 Ibid., p. 584. 5 See Mark 1:35-37. 6 Christian Science Hymnal, No. 342.{et