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Blogs by Joel Arnold
Blessings - or - What I write after having one too many... 8/3/2011 5:39:20 PM
Blessings; sometimes they come at you disguised as failure and pain.
Sometimes it’s the late night mugging that causes you to miss the taxi that crashes into a building.
Sometimes it’s the bounced check that keeps you from buying that fifth of Beam that could’ve pushed you over the edge.
Sometimes it’s the heart attack that lets the doctor find the malignancy before it metastasizes.
Sometimes it’s getting fired from your job, saving you from years of tediousness and ulcers.
Sometimes it’s the DUI that kept you from killing a family of five or causing the VFW to put up a white cross on the side of the road to mark your passing.
Sometimes it’s the dad who abandons you at a young age so that a loving step-dad can take his place.
Sometimes it’s the teenage abortion that lets you get your shit together and raise a healthy family full of love.
Sometimes it’s the loss of a beloved pet that teaches you about the sanctity of life or prepares you for the death of someone close to you.
A forest fire clears the way for new growth; the ashes create a fertile, potent soil.
If you believe in God, then perhaps God allows tragedy to happen so that we may remember how to live. If you don’t believe in God, tragedies still happen, and perhaps it’s still best to remember how to live.
Sometimes tragedy is what makes us feel again, wakes us up from a coma of complacency, jars us into remembering how to live again.
There are blessings in every tragedy, blessings in every death, every accident, every disappointment – if only to be found in the gained wisdom of the survivors. Yes, of course, take time to grieve tragedy, but eventually allow yourself to open to the resultant blessing. The whole story of human kind is written by blessing after blessing wrought from tragedy after tragedy.
Please don’t think I like tragedy, nor do I wish it upon anyone else. I’m certainly not advocating for the creation of it. There’s enough tragedy in the world to go around without our help. But…tragedy is a fact of life – it will always be here – and instead of falling to my knees and suffocating in its ashes, I’d rather spend my energy gathering those blessings that bloom from it.
