Have you ever had a bad experience that eventually led to a good one?
My wife’s Hebrew name Shoshana means “rose.” When we took each other for life, we took each other for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, to death shall we part – both petals and thorns. And we’ve been thankful for finding each other almost every day of our combined life, even on the bad days.
Why? Because we’ve never been able to learn which good things would not eventually lead to bad things nor which bad things would not eventually lead to good things.
Susan’s ovarian cancer was one of those bad things … though it eventually led to a good thing. When faced with the fact that her ovaries, which were supposed to be the size of walnuts, had grown into masses the size of tennis balls, the fear of having to face the rest of my life without the other half of me was almost more than I could bear.
Luckily she had one of the least deadly types of ovarian cancer and she has now lived almost two decades to tell the story. Nonetheless, there were many days of focused anxiety and anxious focusing during the weeks between the initial dreaded annual exam, the meeting with the surgeon where we reviewed whether he thought that he had “gotten it all,” and the later follow-up discussion of the pathology report, which only gave us a one in six chance of having this particular cancer reoccur. (Anyone for a daily game of Russian roulette?)
During that time, my wife and I sought solace in and received great healing from almost every relationship that we had going at the time. Those relationships included our God, each other, our children, parents, family, true friends, community, employees, customers, and someone else that I had not really talked to seriously for a good long time – myself.
While talking to myself and to the others who were supporting us, I realized that my wife and I had strayed from some of the principles that we had espoused more stridently in the past. Many of the things that we were doing at the time no longer made much sense. The things such as an expensive home, cars, fine furnishings, and clothes, upon the accumulation of which we had increasingly become focused, gave us absolutely no comfort in our time of need.
It was the large number of people and the extensive relationships that we had enjoyed with them over the years that were sustaining us and supporting us. The people around us, through acts and deeds both small and large were helping to hold our lives together in a way that we had never imagined. They were giving us significant amounts of their own precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people. All of the people around us were simply wonderful and their helping us through that time was more valuable than we could ever repay.
Some time after the anxiety subsided, I began to reflect on what had happened, how our circle of great people had responded and how we could ever repay them. But I never did. I just went back to work chasing more dreams of having more things. Working harder to build bigger kingdoms to rule.
And then it dawned on me that the worst time in my life so far had turned into the best turning point of my life, because it taught me if I was going to find peace and satisfaction in life, then I was going to have to change my thinking and not work to have more things, but rather I was going to have to find some way to work for the sake of being satisfied with my work itself.
And from thence came my first book on Greatness!, Great! All the Time!
Question: What is the last time you though something was a thorn in your side but it turned out to be petals in your pocket?
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