The Good Truth about Bad Situations

You know, for all the complications that come with human life, the mind itself remains pretty simple after all these years. We compartmentalize what happens to us into one of two categories: good or bad. If we get the job or the client, that is a good thing! If we ask someone out and they say yes, hooray! That’s good too. However, if we lose the job, or if we get rejected, that’s a bad thing. Or is it?

Can you think of a situation in your life that at first seemed terrible, but ended up being the best thing that could have possibly happened? For instance, I once had a friend who became inconsolable when her boyfriend broke up with her. I mean, it’s natural to be upset, but this woman was beyond devastated! In her mind, this was the man who she was supposed to marry. For years, she remained hung up on him. It wasn’t until he finally married someone else that she was at last able to let go of the idea that they were meant to be together.

A funny thing happened next. Just a week after he was married – only seven days after she had finally let go – she met the love of her life. They were married within a year. I was discussing this with her just the other day, in fact. She laughed and said, “Karen, I had no idea something better was on the way.”

I wanted to say, “Really, you had no idea? Because I and about a dozen of your other friends told you that every day!” … But that’s not the real point.

The point of the story is this. Okay, so she’s happy now but what about all those years she spent being miserable over a guy that was never really right for her? Sure, now she can look back and say that what she thought was the worst thing ever was the best thing that could have happened. But guess what? Everything in life is like that. Even the circumstances we see as negative are in fact meant to lead us towards a more positive state of being, and a better way of life.

We don’t need hindsight to have 20/20 if we know that the Creator’s hand is in everything. To find the better job, the soul mate, the right friends, and all the best that life has to offer us, sometimes all we need to do is let go of how we think those things are supposed to look.

It reminds me a lot of this week’s Biblical portion of Balak, and how he tried to curse the Israelites but to no avail. Why couldn’t he curse them? The Bible tells us he could not bring harm to the Israelites because they were blessed. Well, I’ll tell you a secret: One who sees everything as a blessing is truly blessed. When you see the Light in everything – especially when it’s the most difficult – darkness cannot touch you.

This week, when things don’t go the way you planned, let go. Trust that the Creator is leading you to a better destination. And if you have things you’ve been holding onto – experiences in life you’ve been looking at as strictly ‘negative’ – there is an energy in the universe this week that can help us to start seeing the Light that exists there as well. If even in darkness we can trust that the Light is there, we will surely see in time that it is so.