Some blessings are obvious – a child being born, good health, a new job, and answered prayers.
It’s hard to recognize the blessings in disguise. It might be obvious later, but at the time they feel like curses. My husband’s Patriarchal blessing talks a lot about blessings in disguise, so we’re constantly trying to sort out where we have made mistakes or what was meant to be because it led us in the direction God wanted us to go.
If I hadn’t become violently ill in college, I never would have met my husband. I wanted a career in music, so I went for it. I wanted to stay by my home and had no plans to go to Utah, but when I had to take a break from school, my parents suggested I go there to live on my own. If I couldn’t go to school, I could at least learn to be more independent. I was completely against moving to Utah, but it grew on me when I thought about how I could be near my brother and a couple of my cousins. I met my husband through a girl I trained with on my first day as a data technician. How sad it would be not to know him and who know who I would have ended up with? At the time though, I would not have called my illness a blessing.
So when horrible things happen, I have learned to look for the blessings or assume there are blessings. I might never know the purpose of a trial. For instance, we recently got lice twice. I’m just going to believe that if my kids had attended school those days, they would have been exposed to the flu, which would be even more miserable. Lice was horrible, but not life threatening. It even led to a bonding moment with a friend as she checked my hair for me. I may never know what awful things we avoided through that experience, so I try to be grateful that it happened.
When I went to Austria, I tore the ligaments in my ankle the first week I was there. It was so upsetting, but it allowed me to slow down and experience life there the way I wanted. My host family seemed to feel like they had to take me out to eat every night and to every tourist spot, but what I wanted was to learn what their home life was like. As I recovered, I had more opportunities to practice my German with the grandmother who spoke no English. Everyone else wanted to try their English out on me, making it difficult to improve my skills. Yes, it was extremely painful, but a valuable experience.
What are your blessings that were hard to recognize?