Some gifts are presented as losses or goodbyes. Some blessings come after losing certain people or certain jobs or certain battles. You don’t really understand it at first, you try to come up with the most logical reason for why it happened, you just mourn that loss regardless. You mourn the ending. You start thinking to yourself why good things never last, or so you think, until a good amount of time has passed and you finally start seeing why you had to lose this one thing or this one person. You finally start seeing the blessings that follow that loss. You finally find yourself again.
It only hits you when you start realizing that this whole time you weren’t yourself, you were fighting so hard to keep something that wasn’t meant to be yours. You were so focused on making it work that you overlooked all the other possibilities that surround you. The possibilities that come knocking on your door while you’re so busy banging on the one door that’s closed. It only hits you once you realize that God has given you so many signs to change directions but you were too stubborn to follow them. It only hits you once you start repairing all the damage this loss has caused.
We think that blessings have to be ostentatious or worth bragging about, we think that blessings mean happy tears and ecstatic joy. We think that blessings mean big gains or promotions or weddings, and while all these are indeed blessings to be thankful for, we forget to look at the blessings in disguise, the ones that come with painful endings and sorrow and late night tears. The blessings that come with breakups or losing a job or failures. The blessings that we only recognize after we heal. These are the hardest blessings to understand but they’re the most important ones. The ones that we don’t usually know how to accept but we know that we’re being protected from something unfavorable and guided towards something better.
Even though we cringe at the thought of losing someone we once cared deeply about or still do, knowing that this loss can carry with it something far better for us makes the pain a little bit easier to swallow. It makes the sad ending a little bit easier to endure. It reawakens our faith that at the end of the day we can only surrender to the plans God has for us. And even though we await the grand and glorious blessings that we prayed for and we expect them to happen the way we imagined they would and at a certain time, sometimes they come disguised as everything we despise, everything we want to avoid or everything we fear. Sometimes they’re disguised as losses that we will later be so grateful for and a confirmation that we will never truly lose what was meant for us.
