The Unexpected Path of Blessing

No matter where we are in life, no matter what injury or scars envelop us, we can find the good in the bad if we search hard enough.  Sometimes we reach a place in life where we feel a little off balance.  We lose our feeling of identity and subsequently lose our sense of uniqueness and destiny, betraying our own individuality.  Searching questions storm our spirit asking of ourselves, "Who am I?  What's my place?  Where do I fit?  Am I being true to myself, my gifts, my desires, my perceived calling?  The world can all of a sudden become a mirror replicating images that appear real but in truth are mere reflections.

Sometimes we get to a place where we must grant ourselves permission to listen; to eavesdrop on our own heart, to hear ourselves think and allow ourselves to feel.  We must pause and pay attention to what we feel, and to fit those feelings within a frame of thought and fact.  In doing so, we open up our lives to understanding that can alter perspective, aiding us to not judge a situation prematurely.  In most episodes of our lives, there are many moving parts, unseen elements working in the background.  The surface image is not always the truest image.

This time for me has allowed this to occur.  I've been able to identify issues in my past that carried separation, a detachment of some sort that deprived my life of blessing.  I saw everything clearly and saw that separation for what it was and how it impacted my life, mostly robbing me of destiny, leaving me off balance and vulnerable.  I could see where life's mirror cast an image that was anything but true.  I recognized when it wasn't my true image in the mirror; it was somebody else's.  I saw how the good and bad came, how love and loss arrived.  I saw where I made excuses and accepted things that were not true to who I am as a person.

One area of separation I saw is I had this tremendous fear of failure, though at the time I did not even recognize this detachment.  I was not going to let people down and in retrospect that mentality hurt me.  It drove me and drove me.  And this led to some of the missteps.  I explicitly connect this fear, this separation and relentless pushing of myself, to some of the choices I made, to some of the mistakes that caused my life and marriage to unravel.  Deep down, I only hoped to provide a wonderful life for my wife and three daughters and prodigious gain for my investors.  Below all the surface stuff, the visible images created, the facade of illusion and interpretation and implications of story and spin in the public eye, this was my underlying and one true motive.  And the separation, my inability to recognize the disconnect, allowed a lot of bad to infest my life, leaving me to believe blessing may never come again.

Such infractions of bad, as you can imagine or have experienced, have a tendency to cloud perspective on how the wave of blessing unfurls in our lives.  Surprisingly, the way we normally perceive blessing is quite contrary to how blessing arrives.  Routinely a pattern forms in our mind that says, "This good thing leads to this good thing and that good thing leads to blessing."  Though such a process is true, it's not always the norm nor as frequent as we might expect.  As I've studied Scripture and chased the path of blessing through the lives of various characters filling the Bible's pages, I find a pattern contradicting our common perception of how blessing arrives.  Recurrently I find "this bad thing leads to this bad thing and that bad thing leads to this good thing--blessing."

I revisited the story of Joseph and found this divergent pattern of blessing dominating his life and story.  The bad (his brothers' jealousy) led to a bad thing (Joseph thrown in a pit and left to die) led to another bad thing (Joseph sold into slavery) and that bad thing led to an unimaginable blessing of Joseph finding favor and being made the viceroy of a very wealthy and prominent man in Egypt.  Later in his life the same pattern of blessing reappears: a proper act of rejecting the advances of his boss's wife led to a bad thing (Joseph thrown in prison) led to another bad thing (Joseph forgotten in prison) led to an astonishing blessing of Joseph rediscovering his gifts and becoming Prime Minister of Egypt.  Ultimately this blessing led to the rescue of the very people who betrayed Joseph--his brothers--and this led to his entire family being saved from financial ruin and possible death.

The outcome of blessing in Joseph's life was something he could not foresee when he was in the throes of trouble and hardship.  When only bad surrounded him, it must have been difficult for him to consider, let alone comprehend, that he was on the path to blessing.  If anything, he must have believed the opposite.  But in spite of that separation, the detachment from truth, Joseph discovered a key.  And that key unlocked the door of blessing in his life: Joseph embraced his state of affairs and did not dismiss or waste the years when the bad enveloped him.  He embraced his circumstance and never allowed actions or choices, be it his own or those of another, to destroy him.  He could have allowed the bad years to make him bitter and negative.  But he chose the opposite.  He was determined to trust God by continuing to do his best, to give his all, and to be productive amidst the chaos encumbering his life.

By embracing where we are, we permit God to fight our battles when we are powerless to do so ourselves.  At the same time, we unlock the door of blessing, enabling good to come from the carnage and wreckage the bad has brought.  Don't shortchange or dismiss the bad in your life because inevitably something good comes from it, and sometimes, the greatest blessing flows from something we never imagined could lead to blessing.

One of the greatest writers in history, Fyodor Dostoevsky experienced this pattern of blessing.  Early in his life the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas I, sentenced him to 10 years in prison.  Prison became a crucible of religious faith for him as he pored over the New Testament.  He described a process in which the blunt reality of human evil convinced him of the need for redemption.  Then through the living witness of believers in prison, he saw the possibility of transformation.  And this led to his conversion and subsequent search to extract meaning from the horrendous experience of life in a Siberian prison camp.  Eventually the bad engulfing his life led to an unbelievable blessing: Dostoevsky discovered his gift for writing and this led to the authoring of Crimes and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, arguably the two greatest novels in history.

In a similar way I've experienced this same pattern of blessing.  Nearly a year ago a friend approached me with a novel he was writing, asking for my critique and opinion.  Reading the text, I immediately recognized the potential of a fascinating story that could reach publication.  I also saw the need to tighten the writing with tension and suspense.  So I agreed to help and this began my foray into the world of fiction writing.  A year later, a 600 page novel is now complete, undergoing the next phase of the publishing process.  This effort of assisting with the writing of a novel not only reignited my love for writing, it also fanned the flame of fiction writing in my heart which has led to an unforeseen blessing in my life.

In the beginning I was very tepid about my ability to write fiction.  Honestly, I didn't believe I possessed the skill set to perform such a task.  But the effort of aiding another coupled with the relentless pursuit of developing this skill in my life has resulted in an unexpected blessing I never imagined could be found in this type of experience, which I can only label as bad.

I launched my expedition of writing fiction by penning a short romantic story centered in Italy involving an American man and Italian woman.  The writing brims with exotica and imagery, supporting a plot line that surges forward and pulls the reader along, culminating with a heart tugging ending in which two broken lives find wholeness, healing, and love. 

I distributed the short story to various men and women who read extensively, asking for an honest critique of the work.  As I awaited feedback, I pressed forward in outlining a suspense novel that's been on my heart to write for some time, a propulsive thriller bearing a social conscience.  The story originates in the United States and expands into Europe, fueled by a dilemma that a likeable protagonist faces, "What do you do when the only right thing to do is the wrong thing to do?"  It's a riveting tale of love and loss and power and corruption, coalescing dilemmas seen daily in today's headlines, while taking the reader on a ride through twisting plots leading to a soaring climax.

As I delved into the early stages of writing this novel, reviews came back on the short story.  I was taken aback by the comments.  All critiques were favorable, the most common reactions being "moving, gripping, heartrending, tearjerker."  More dumbfounding was the advice I received from each reviewer: "Turn this story into a full-fledged novel and screenplay; it possesses all the elements that could lead to a blockbuster book and movie."  So I've followed this advice and begun this journey.

In every bad thing we can find something good if we move forward, lay the past to rest, and press ahead with our future, doing what we can to right our wrongs and remain true to those dreams God placed in our heart.  In this context we experience blessing and we allow God to help us discover gifts we never knew we had.

We can navigate situations in which the unknown predominates and our understanding is limited.  We grow and improve through adversity.  We must learn to benefit from disorder in our lives.  Modernity has been obsessed with comfort and cosmetic stability, but by making ourselves too comfortable and attempting to eliminate volatility from our lives, we make our spirits fragile.  We miss out on blessings that come from the bad, the disorder, and the pain.  Don't accept the bad or ignore the bad.  Use it to pursue what's good.  Discover the immense blessing that's found in the bad.

Right now, I'm at a place where I dismiss negative energy, the status quo of life.  I reject the monologue a place like this tries to throw on me, the rhetoric of what others perceive prison does to one's life.  I reject advice that desires to temper me, "Don't love as hard, don't work out so hard, don't laugh so hard."  When you lose your life it grants a perspective unfound in the commonality of living.  You stop to take stock of the world around you.  I do my best to view life through a lens that recognizes, "this bad thing may have led to this bad thing and that bad thing will lead to a good thing--blessing.”  This time in my life could very well be the gift that God gave to usher in the miracle of restitution in my legal situation and one that will provide for my daughters' futures.

By pushing through my comfort zone and exhorting my spirit through the bad, I've been able to train an emotional muscle that serves me well today.  All of us on a daily basis have opportunity to move forward or backward or stay put.  Today, I know to move forward.  Always.  Life's blessings await.  And they await you as well.