Blessings in Disguise

My favorite salad dressing is Golding Farms fat-free raspberry walnut vinaigrette. I used to buy it regularly at Walmart. For several months now, I haven’t been able to find it. I bought other raspberry vinaigrettes, but I didn’t like them. Every time I went to the grocery store, I checked to see if it was back. After weeks of disappointment, I finally concluded that they must have discontinued production of this item for some reason.

Yesterday I was at Walmart, passing by the salad dressing shelves, and there it was! One lonely jar of my salad dressing. I was ecstatic! I grabbed it and started searching behind it to see if there were more hidden in the back of the shelves. There were! Except all the other bottles had completely different packaging! The bottles were a new shape and the label was completely different. I would never have recognized them as my beloved salad dressing without this one old bottle sitting in front! I wondered if these bottles had been there for the last few months, and I had just overlooked them because they were not in the usual packaging.
 
At times, it’s hard to recognize blessings when they come in unusual packaging. Here are a few examples. An acquaintance of mine became a close friend only after we went through similar hardships. I would never have recognized our kinship, because she looks and acts completely differently than I do. When my husband and I moved to the Midwest, away from all that was familiar, we saw it as a time of trial. But now, in retrospect, we acknowledge that this was a blessing in disguise.

Certain life events, like weddings, births, graduations, etc., are easily categorized as blessings. Others, like moving to an unfamiliar place, a serious illness, unemployment, relationship troubles, etc., are seen as misfortunes. Every one of these life events involve struggle. There is as much pain in birth as there is in death, as much struggle in building a relationship as in ending one. Blessings often come packaged in pain, labeled as affliction.

Occasionally, these difficult circumstances cause us to turn away from God. This is what turns an affliction into a curse. However, if any of these struggles bring us closer to God, then ultimately, they become blessings.