Happiness in a Jar

Happiness in a Jar

Posted by Stephen Larriva

A friend of mine posted this idea on Facebook. I thought it was a really great one, so I gave it a try.

Start the year with an empty jar and fill it with notes about good things that happen. On New Year’s Eve, empty it and see what awesome stuff happened that year.

I didn’t start my jar a year ago. I actually started mine sometime in August, when I saw the post, but I figured, “Better late than never.”

So now I’m at the end of the year and I have emptied all the little pieces of paper on my desk and am opening them one by one. There are the obvious ones that I would have remembered without the slip of paper, like “17-year anniversary” and “awesome vacation on the beach.” There are ones that I would not have remembered if I had not stopped to meditate on the blessings of the past year, like miracles of supply, breakthroughs in the lives of our friends, and answered prayers—so many answered prayers. There are also ones that I would have totally forgotten if it were not for the little paper in the jar. Things like “beautiful sunrise,” “a good night’s sleep,” “amazing thunderstorm.”

One in particular caught my eye: on a small light blue piece of paper there’s one word: a descriptive noun for the word “poop.” It rhymes with Schmitt. It is not a word I commonly use, but it seemed like the right word for the situation. Let me explain….

It had been a crazy week with little unexpected emergencies popping up almost daily, and I was a week past a deadline for a recording project.

Now here I was, in a small closet under the stairs of our house, in a cramped makeshift recording studio, feeling quite sorry for myself because it was late and I was tired, with recording taking much longer than it should have.

At 3:00 AM I was finally finished. My back hurt, I had a headache, I was exhausted, and the upcoming day promised to be a very full one.

I was in a sorry mood as I limped up the stairs, flipping off light switches and double-checking the locks on windows and doors as I made my way to my cozy bed. As I passed a bathroom I could tell by the smell that it needed to be flushed. I flushed it, muttering to myself. As I went up to the next story I found yet another toilet that needed flushing. “Why can’t people flush toilets?” Finally, I went to my bedroom, stripped off my clothes, and got ready to take a well-deserved shower. That’s when I realized that I had left my cell phone downstairs.

I wrapped myself in a towel and whined that if I had a newer cell phone I would not have to plug it in to charge every night. I moaned to myself how hard my life was. As I came down the stairs I could hear water running. Just as I was stepping off the final stair into the hallway my nose alerted me to what my bare foot was about to encounter a millisecond later.—The downstairs toilet had overflowed. To my horror, there was “poopie water” everywhere! And when I say everywhere, I don’t mean that figuratively; it was everywhere! It was on the floor of the bathroom, of course, and in the hall too. I stood aghast as I watched the water flow toward the living room and kitchen.

Stephen and Amber Larriva

I opened the small linen closet and thankfully found a large pile of neatly folded floor rags. “Better than a mop,” I thought to myself, as I strategically “dammed” the flow. “Just what I needed—a plumbing disaster at 3:00 AM!” I fumed. I was so angry my vision literally clouded. Who I was so angry with, I could not say. At myself perhaps? God? The doo-doo demon? I started with the plunger, addressing the source of the problem. I was soon able to remove the blockage, then took to the task of cleaning up.

Because of a long-standing back problem, bending down really isn’t an option for me, so I decided the most efficient way to clean up was simply to get on my hands and knees. Unfortunately, the towel around my waist kept getting into the muck, so I tossed it aside and continued my cleaning … in the buff. I was not having fun.

My father had taught me that the use of vulgarity in an argument was a sign of a weak argument. Well, my argument that night was very, very weak. The problem was I wasn’t actually arguing with anyone. I was just muttering to myself in a nonsensical, butt-naked, kneeling-in-poop sort of way. I began to earnestly pray that my teenagers would not come downstairs for any reason. I imagine that seeing a portly middle-aged man naked as a jaybird on his hands and knees in a puddle of poop water is not something that is easily “unseen,” and quite frankly, I don’t think we would have been able to afford the therapy that they would’ve needed to recover from the emotional scarring.

After about 45 minutes, the bulk of the water and its inglorious contents were basically cleaned up, and I went to the kitchen to upgrade my cleaning arsenal. As I stood there filling up the bucket with warm soapy water, I had my first positive thought in the entire ordeal. A dear friend had posted photos of their new house on Facebook. It was a beautiful house, but the house had one oddity: the kitchen was fully carpeted. I’ve never seen anything like that before and couldn’t help being thankful that we had no carpet in our kitchen. In fact, our entire house is tile. There’s no carpet in it at all. And I am so thankful!

And at that point something inside me changed.—My attitude changed. My conditions hadn’t changed. I was still tired, my back still hurt, and the entire house smelled like, well, let’s just say it didn’t smell so nice. But it started to dawn on me how blessed I was and how spoiled I have become.

I have running water! At a flick of a switch I have light. And I have toilets INSIDE my house! It would be impossible for one-third of the world’s population to live through this “traumatic experience” that I was whining about for the simple reason that 2.6 billion people have no internal plumbing. In a flash it dawned on me how awesome my life is and how blessed I am. So true is the quote by Henry Ward Beecher, “Many of our cares are but a morbid way of looking at our privileges. We let our blessings get moldy, and then call them curses.”

In the end, the floor was cleaned, I got my nice hot shower, and I got into my cozy bed for a few hours too. A well-placed fan and some open windows and there was no residual smell to greet us in the morning. And we have not had a problem with our plumbing since.

The jar now sits empty on my desk, ready for the new year.