Oh Happy Day😀

Daily writing prompt

If you could relive one day from your past, which day would it be and why?

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I love reflecting on the past. I just find it hard to make up my mind on which day that I’d like to relive. Maybe I’d choose the first day of each new stage or era. I remember back in 1982, I was unemployed and too young for my specific teacher training course. I wanted a job or some voluntary scheme. I applied to spend a year with London City Mission working as a voluntary evangelist. I thought it was a bit of a long shot, but to my surprise, I got a letter of acceptance. I still have that letter. And when I actually began, I remember sitting in my new home – a hostal in Bermondsey and feeling that this was all so wonderfully unreal. I loved that year, though I’m sure I was my usual miserable self for some of the time 😀. But that first day was such a happy one.

I could say the day that I committed my life to Christ. But that wasn’t a particularly happy day. I spent some of it wondering if I might just go back to my old self in a couple of days. I didn’t change completely overnight, but it gave me the momentum to persist. The whole point is to repent and trust in Jesus for salvation, and to become His disciple, or learner. As a learner and a teacher, I never saw much perfection, but I was always pleased with people who were eager to progress, even if progress was slow. I remember a school report as a child which said that I was making slow, steady progress. That pretty much sums me up 😀.

I had the assurance of heaven, but it also brought me a lot of joy in this life. I was baptised as an infant, but the evangelical churches that I’ve attended practice believer’s baptism – you only get baptized when you personally trust in Jesus. I was a bit confused about that at first, but I accepted it after a few months. And I was baptised in the spring of 1981. That was a very happy night. I remember making a drawing of it the next day – which I still have somewhere. I don’t draw much – but that’ll tell you something of the impact that it had on me 😀. I wanted to relive it the very next day.

I could think of many happy days ever since. These days, if I visit somewhere nice, such as Killarney, I foundly remember visiting them when the kids were young, and find myself wishing that I could go back in time.

I sometimes even think that I’d like to relive any day – even the difficult days. I’d see them from a different perspective. And I also wish that I could go back into the past and stop something bad from happening. We had a prompt like that a few days ago.

Anyway, I’ll close with Oh Happy Day – a hymn – or a few hymns on that theme. I’m not sure what the happy day refers to. The hymn says “when Jesus washed my sins away.” I think of that as the day that Jesus died, not the day of my conversion. Perhaps it was applied to me on that day. And that was the day that I became aware that He had washed my sins away.

But though I conciously committed my life to Christ in August 1980, I might have been a true believer before then – maybe even from childhood – but a very mixed up one. One way or the other, I’m very happy for what happened that day 46 years ago. It worked.