Blue Monday and Bird Songs

Welcome to January!  Did you know that January has the privilege of hosting “Blue Monday,” the most depressing day of the year?   Evidently, a formula has determined that the third Monday in January is when everyone collectively feels . . . well, terrible.  They reference several factors: 

1) Holidays are over and none are on the horizon
2) Post-holiday debt
3) Failed resolutions
4) Gloomy weather
5) Low motivation levels
6) “Hibernation” effect ( eating and sleeping more)

. . . and there are surely more.

A few days ago, I was wearing my “Blue Monday” mindset and thinking rather negatively about the current January weather when I stopped myself in my kitchen to listen to birds chirping!  It had to have been only 25 degrees outside.   If anyone should be sour about the January weather, birds certainly have the right.  Instead, they burrow their tiny heads in their wintery feathers to the best of their ability and congregate in the trees making sounds that decorate the silence of winter.   (I snapped a photo of them in my yard!) 

In light of the January blues, I’m asking God to help me be like the birds -- to be ignorant of the insignificant things in life that cause frustration and accept everything with a song.  May joy be completely unrestrained and unhampered by Blue Mondays!

“Sing to the Lord a new song;
sing to the Lord, all the earth” (Psalm 96:1).

-Kelly B