Have you ever had a day when you ended up further behind than when you started? That was me yesterday. I actually spent half my day undoing what I did the first half of the day because no one told me what I did was not the best thing to do at the time. I was told later I needed to wait a couple months. (It would have  been nice to have had that information ahead of time, but … oh well.) So now I am switching back phone carriers trying just to get back to where I was at the start of yesterday. I basically will be telling them today, “Make it like yesterday never happened.” Can they do that?

In the midst of all this, we had a plumber here half of the day and today, the problem he came to fix is worse. So now we’re back to square 1. It feels a little like Ground Hog Day. I half expected Sonny and Cher to wake me up this morning. The last straw was when I found out at 8:10 last night that I had to get to a phone company store a half hour away that closed at 9:00 to obtain a 6-digit transfer PIN that I needed in order to reverse what I did yesterday. They couldn’t verify me over the phone; I had to be there in person. I made it by 10 minutes to spare, and that’s all I got. I did all that for a 6-digit number that they couldn’t give me over the phone.

Do you ever feel like you are going backwards with your spiritual growth? You thought you had something solved and there it is again rearing its ugly head. Growth sometimes feels like two steps forward and one step back. But the end result is progress. As long as we are making progress, God can teach us. The important thing is to maintain an attitude of gratitude through it all. God is more concerned with that than with how much we get done in a day.

Larry Norman used to sing: “Walking backwards down the stairs, trying to get higher…” That’s a little like me right now. At least I’m facing in the right direction. I may be walking backwards, but I’m still going up the stairs.