How Elly Chose Joy

Bang! Ker-splat! The plastic bottle bounced out of Elly’s hands, spraying milk formula everywhere. What a mess!

Elly started to cry. “This always happens to me when I try to get the nipple on top!” she wailed. She was eight now, and Mama had decided that she was responsible enough to have her own special pet. How excited Elly had been at first! But she had found out that bottle-feeding a baby goat was sometimes a big pain.

And today everything had seemed to go wrong. First, Clarabelle the cow had been difficult so Mama had to go out to help with the milking. That meant that breakfast wasn’t made when Aunt Laura came to help for the morning. And then they had to eat oatmeal, which wasn’t Elly’s favorite. Especially when Aunt Laura didn’t put enough sweetener in it. And just Elly had been asking for more sweetener, Aunt Laura remembered that the goat hadn’t been fed. So now Elly stood in the middle of a milk formula mess while her bowl of salty-tasting oatmeal sat at the table getting cold. Wouldn’t you feel like crying, too?

“We’ll just have to clean it up,” Aunt Laura said, grabbing a couple rags. She gave one to Elly and told her to wipe off the counter first.

“Can’t you help me?” Elly asked, looking dismally at the globs of milk powder and pools of water all over the floor.

“We’ll work together,” Aunt Laura said. “Stay out of the kitchen,” she warned the little ones, as she wrung out a sopping rag and gave it back to Elly.

But Little Sister chose that moment to get annoying. “You left your boots out by the playset,” she told Elly, in her I-know-more-than-you voice. “You don’t want them to get rained on, do you?”

“Stop being a boss,” Elly retorted. “I’m having a bad morning and I don’t need you to tell me what to do!”

Little Sister poked her head around the counter to see Elly’s “bad morning.” That didn’t help one bit.

“Get out of my way!” Elly said, impatiently.

“Go back to the table and finish eating,” Aunt Laura said, marching Little Sister out of the kitchen. Elly could hear Aunt Laura saying that Elly was having a trial and it was best to leave her alone.

“What’s a trial?” Little Sister asked. She was almost four and could be so frustrating sometimes! But Aunt Laura patiently explained that trials were when you had something hard to do and you had to be brave to do it.

But Elly didn’t feel so brave that morning. When the mess was finally cleaned up, she still had to eat the nasty oatmeal. Mama came inside then and agreed that she could add some cinnamon to make it taste better. But Elly dumped too much in by accident, and it tasted worse then ever!

At last breakfast was over and the kid goat was fed. Elly’s trials were over and she could have math class with Aunt Laura. Despite being late, they had a few minutes to try out the new geoboard Aunt Laura had brought. It was so fun to make designs with the rubber bands that Elly didn’t want to stop. “Maybe tomorrow, if we have enough time,” Aunt Laura told her, tucking the board away in her bag.

But the next day math class was Elly’s big trial. For her warm-up activity, Elly always wrote a 4-digit addition problem on her slate while Aunt Laura set the clock. Then she would solve the problem and subtract to see if she was right. When she was finished, she would find out how long she had taken. Elly’s best score had been 1 minute when she had added 6661 to 1116.

“Maybe I could get done in 1 minute again,” Elly thought, as she quickly wrote the same problem on her board.

But Aunt Laura said, “Not the same numbers. This time use 8 and 2.”

Elly thought that wouldn’t be too hard. She wrote out 8882 plus 2228. Everything was going along fine until Elly started subtracting. Oh, no! The answer didn’t match.

“Maybe you should add these numbers again,” Aunt Laura suggested. Elly felt a sinking in her middle. She hated having to do something over again—especially because it made everything take longer! Dismally she erased the bottom of the slate and starting adding all over again.

Sure enough, the numbers came out differently—with a whole row of ones. When Elly wrote down the subtraction problem, she had to regroup every single column. That took a long time. To make matters worse, her numbers kept getting crooked and she had to keep erasing them. Then the columns didn’t line up.

“I can’t do it!” Elly said, in exasperation. “It is all turning out wrong!” She felt like crying.

“Don’t let the gloom of the day drag you down,” Aunt Laura said, cheerfully. She started humming “The joy of the Lord is my strength,” as she helped Elly straighten out her numbers. “Look, you are almost done. All you need is to subtract the two from the last ten. You already know the answer for that!”

Elly sighed and wrote the last 8 in place. At last the horrid problem was finished. But it had taken way too long. “Sixteen minutes!” Elly cried in dismay when she counted up the difference between her starting and finishing times. “That was horrible!”

“But you finished the problem, and you got it right,” Aunt Laura said, encouragingly. “That’s two good things! I know you wanted it to be quick, but doing a long problem shows that you are really learning.” But Elly wasn’t happy. There wasn’t time for the geoboard design and her class was ruined.

“You have to make a choice right now,” Aunt Laura pointed out. “You can think of everything that went wrong, and how you didn’t make your goal of doing your math problem quickly…” Yes, that was what Elly was thinking about. And it made her so frustrated!

But Aunt Laura was still talking, “Or you can choose the joy of the Lord. I’m glad I’m choosing joy today, because I might be frustrated and gloomy if I didn’t!” Aunt Laura began singing, but it didn’t improve Elly’s mood.

“I always get things wrong!” she complained. “It took so long that we don’t have time for anything else!”

“But that happens to all of us,” Aunt Laura said. “Did you hear about Mama’s trial with the yogurt this morning?” Elly hadn’t, but the description of yogurt all over the counter reminded her of yesterday’s mess. “Isn’t it a good thing that Mama took courage in her trial and worked to solve it, instead of crying on the couch?” Aunt Laura said, with a little smile.

Elly almost smiled back thinking of her Mama acting like a cry baby. No, Mama never did that. “You see, the joy of the Lord is our strength!” Aunt Laura said. “Why don’t you sing it with me?” She started adding a few hand motions to the song. “See, it will cheer you up!” Elly didn’t want to be cheered up, but finally she decided to join Aunt Laura in making hand signs to go with the words. “After we learn it really well, we can teach the others,” Aunt Laura encouraged her. “Choosing joy is so much better than letting the gloom of the day drag you down!”

After Aunt Laura went home, Elly thought about the song and the new hand signs. The next morning before math class, she had an idea. On a bright strip of paper she wrote the words to the verse. Then she taped it to her desk.

Aunt Laura smiled when she saw it. “That is right! I’m going to choose joy again today. I hope you will too, because I’ve decided I’ll just leave you to work by yourself if you want to be gloomy.”

But Elly had already decided that gloom wasn’t going to drag her down this time. Even when Little Sister got to play with the geoboard while she was solving problems on her slate. “Oh, no—she broke one of the rubber bands,” Elly said. But she didn’t get mad or yell at Little Sister.

“What’s that?” Little Ssister asked, pointing to the bright strip of paper.

“It’s a song we’re going to teach you at the end of class,” Elly said, smiling at Aunt Laura.

“That’s right,” Aunt Laura agreed.

“You can use my slate to draw on,” Elly told Little Sister, when it was time for math drills. And because she chose joy, she felt happy and content, even though she didn’t get very many of the drills done before the timer went off. It didn’t matter, because now they would get to do the geoboard design!

Suddenly Mama’s voice came down the hall, “Two minutes until history class!” Elly’s heart sank.

“There is time for one more thing,” Aunt Laura said. “Do you want to do one geoboard design, or show the motions for our song?”

Elly thought a moment. “I want to do the song,” she decided. And even though she didn’t get to do the geoboard design, she was happy. That’s because Elly had chosen joy.