When you are awoken at 2:30 am by a large “Whoomp” noise that shakes your house, followed by the smell of something burning, it’s hard to see a blessing in it. When you find yourself at an all night super store at 3am buying a carbon monoxide detector so you can sleep peacefully, it seems a rather large inconvenience. When at last you get the furnace folks to tell you that it will cost a few thousand dollars to install a new one just a few short weeks after you have replaced the dishwasher that leaked water, and the microwave that quit, a silver lining seems black.
I freely admit I am not always good at seeing the blessings in things when they happen. For some things I may never see it, but I do believe there is a blessing, a lesson or an opportunity in everything if you look for it. Things go wrong, pretty much daily. Like anyone else my first instinct is to say, “REALLY?!” It’s easy to get mired down in the why me and why now? But when I look through calmer eyes I can see like most things, this was not a tragedy. Tragedy would be being unable to get this fixed, being unable to provide warmth and comfort for my family. I think if you look around you, and I mean right near you, you can see how blessed you are in the heartbreaking things that happen to our loved ones everyday. From the co-worker who just lost her mother; the friend whose son was born with a heart defect and the neighbor who was laid off from their job.
My grandmother used to say, “If all you look for is the bad, that’s all you’ll ever find.” I try to remember that. So, I stop. I slow down. Have a cup of coffee (or wine) reset and calm myself and try to look for the good. What I find is the friend who lost her mother but was able to have a few months of time to share her newborn son before she passed. I watch in awe of the boy with the heart condition who soldiers on through every surgery and teaches everyone around him about strength and hope; and the neighbor who is now pursuing a dream of owning their own business. Some days I am able to see my blessings through the trials of others, some days my trials can serve as a reminder to them. That is the ebb and flow of life.
Whether you believe things happen for a reason or that it’s all just a big crapshoot; if you try to adopt this perspective of looking for some good in anything (and some days are a real challenge to do it) it can really take a bad situation and soften it. It doesn’t solve the issue at hand but it can make it easier to bear.
It allows you to appreciate the 24 hour super store when the furnace installer tells you that these old furnaces are prone to carbon monoxide in these circumstances. It helps you jump for joy when he pulls a corroded and cracked gas line from under your house and tells you that the broken furnace and the broken gas line have nothing to do with each other but that without one you wouldn’t have known about the other until your house exploded. That’s a blessing that was easy to find.
