There is a creature in this world called a barnacle goose. 

If you ever meet one (and if it will let you) you should give it a pat on the head because every living barnacle goose has had at least one very bad day. Barnacle geese are largely from Greenland where there are no trees and arctic foxes quickly raid any nest laid upon the ground. Barnacle geese solve that problem by flying up and building their nests on rocky crags a few hundred feet above the ground. That is a great plan, and it works brilliantly until exactly three days after their chicks hatch.

But that is when things get complicated.

Barnacle geese, like all geese, do not feed their babies in the nest. All geese lead their babies to food. That is the reason you sometimes see a goose swimming across a pond with all her goslings bobbing around behind her. So at the ripe old age of three days, every newborn barnacle goose needs to leave the nest to go eat. But they are on rocky ledges about three hundred feet off the ground.

Here is where the bad day comes in.

The mother goose solves this problem by flying gently down to the ground and honking at her goslings to follow her. Then the baby geese, who cannot fly, waddle over to the edge of the crag and jump in her direction. Then they fall those hundreds of feet. As they fall they smash upon the rocks. And a significant percentage of them die. The rest of them sorely hobble around until they find their mother, and then waddle off behind her to find some grass to eat.

In my book, that's a bad day.

But for some of those little geese, it gets even worse! When they jump from the nest, many of the baby geese don’t make it all the way down on the first try. They fall part way down, smash into a ledge, and stop. Then they have an even worse decision to make than they had at first. Ten seconds prior when they jumped from the first ledge there were things about life that they did not know. They did not know they couldn’t fly. They did not know what gravity was. They did not know pain. But now here they are, only ten seconds older and yet much much wiser, having painfully learned all of these things. And in the fullness of that knowledge… they have to jump again! 

Have you ever had that kind of bad day?

The kind of bad day in which you know what you have to do, you know that it is going to be awful, and yet there is no other way forward. I know you have, because we all have. It’s such a common and important experience of life that psychologists have invented a term to describe the experience. They call it delayed gratification.

Delayed gratification is the choice to do something hard now because it’s going to bring you something better later.

Delayed gratification is the reason why people work hard at jobs they don’t particularly like, or practice hard even though today isn’t game day. It is the reason why people go to college and save up for retirement or vacations. And it is a very important thing. A lot of success in life depends on people’s willingness to choose delayed gratification.

The much more tempting approach to life is to choose instant gratification. Instant gratification is the choice to do whatever feels the best or at least the least bad right now. Instant gratification is the reason why people stop going to work even though they have bills to pay, or why people feed their addictions even though they are destroying their lives. It is the reason why people stay up a few extra hours playing video games even though they’re supposed to be up early the next morning. And it is a big problem in life. A lot of life’s failures can be traced back to our patterns of choosing the easiest path in the moment rather than the right path for success.

Sometimes in life, bad days are just bad days. But sometimes, bad days are very important moments. Moments in which we choose either to continue on the easier road to the life we don’t want, or we choose to do hard and scary things as we seek out the lives we do want. Sometimes the ground is far away, the rocks are really sharp, and we still need to jump. 

“For the joy set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Hebrews 12:2