Finding Joy

The other day I walked into the bathroom and saw the toilet seat was up.

Ugh.  

This is normally annoying to me because:

 1) A good friend once told me that when you flush your toilet with the lid open, the bacteria can spray all over the place (like even on your toothbrushes on the counter...eeewww). 

2) Our semi-walking baby loves nothing more than to army crawl into the bathroom and pull himself up on the toilet so that he can flush, flush, flush away all his cares in the world.

But today, it was annoying for another reason:

Someone had left a "gift" all over the inside of the toilet which I could easily ignore with the seat down, but once I saw it, I knew it had to be cleaned ASAP.

So as I began my internal grumbling of "Why do I not only have to change poopy diapers, and wipe poopy potty trained toddlers' bottoms, but now I also have to clean up the remnants left on the toilet?"  I knew for sure that I was not the one who made this mess, but I went to get the bleach and other cleaning supplies because if I'm going to clean the toilet at 9 pm, I might as well miserably clean the whole bathroom.  Poor, poor, pitiful me. 

As I started clearing off the bathroom counter, I came across this:

Keep in mind that we are in the month of June, and this was a misplaced Christmas decoration that was overlooked during our annual January-1st-I'm-so-sick-of-looking-at-all-these-decorations cleanup.  And not only was it completely out of season, I hadn't even noticed it before that very moment.

When I saw it, I couldn't help but smile.

Here was God, trying to help me find joy.

My grumbling, miserable, ungrateful excuse for a mom couldn't seem to find any happiness in the middle of all that (literal) crap.  And so God gave me a (literal) sign to help me remember that finding joy is possible when we are doing His will.

As I cleaned the rest of the bathroom that night, I truly felt joy in serving my family, because  no matter how much I loathe the mess, I love the ones who made it.