I am minded of a scene in the live action version of 'Beauty and the Beast,' wherein Belle's father is trying to find the castle again and mulling over a certain tree, originally a lightning strike knocked it over, forcing him down a path he didn't want to take, but now it was again strangely upright. How many times does lightning strike in our lives to force us down the path we should go but which we'd rather not tread? This is not to say that every negative event in our lives is of this sort, we live in a fallen and broken world after all, evil and suffering are an innate part of our lives, but there are certain events seemingly hardwired into our story or at least sent to push us in the direction we must go, and in the end, they turn out to be a blessing, if not for us, then certainly for others.
A misplaced college application (on their side) prevented me from going to the school I was determined to attend, forcing me to go to another school that turned out to be exactly what I needed for many, many reasons. I showed up for a tour and they had no idea who I was and it was well past the date required to qualify for financial aid; the other school had given me a very good scholarship, it was closer, and much, much smaller and very well respected in my field of interest. So I went and it turned out to be an excellent choice.
I had a friend who was getting married and they were having a little celebration for the happy couple. I didn't want to go, I was busy, socially awkward...I got kidnapped by another friend who wouldn't take no for an answer and met my future husband there.
I was engaged and ready to graduate from graduate school in a couple months. I needed a job close to by future husband's place of employment. I knew I should send out resumes to every business of that sort within an easy drive, but I was rather embarrassed and nervous to do just that. Instead, I drove all over the countryside interviewing at half a dozen places which were hiring, none of which were even thinkable as options, but I thought I knew better! Finally hitting a wall, I did what I should have from the first (thus saving myself much time, effort, and money!) and the next thing I knew there was a message on my answering machine wanting to do an interview at a place just half an hour from where my fiancé worked.
We were thinking about having kids, but recently I had started taking a particular medication for a genetic condition, the side effects of which prevented us from even thinking about biological children. We immediately started the adoption process, bypassing all the pain and heartache and lost years of infertility that we otherwise would have gone through before doing just that.
I became something of a workaholic, I had a ton of student loans to pay back, my job required fifty plus hours a week, not including being on-call, and I had been raised to think that if I just worked hard enough someone might love me (it didn't work by the way). It was difficult manual labor at all hours, often outdoors in dreadful weather (winter lasted a minimum of 6 months). The aforementioned medication along with the stress of my job and childhood abuse triggered a nameless inflammatory disease. I was sore all the time, everything hurt, I had no energy, even sleeping 10 hours a day, and I could hardly eat anything without it upsetting my gut, but still I pushed myself, determined to do what I thought was my duty, even if it killed me. I was a zombie at home, no help to my husband and baby son. Then my job went south, nine months later I was unemployed, living with my in-laws wondering what was next. Three weeks later we were living in another state, I was a stay-at-home mom, and my husband was working full-time in his profession. I got off the medication and my stress load dropped by 90%. Bam!, I was a person again, while I'm still not free of my disease, I can at least function in daily life and I've never been happier. We've since adopted again and I've been able to start healing emotionally from all the junk I lived through as a kid.
What sort of roadblocks have you run against that turned out to be blessings in disguise?
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