‘MIXED BLESSINGS’

All of us have had times in our lives when we’ve struggled with mixed blessings. Your teenager wrecks the car but no one was hurt. You’ve been waiting at the airport for the last three hours for your parents who were due to arrive on the next plane. Now that flight has been delayed as well and you wait some more. Later you find out traffic on the freeway home was backed up for miles because of a chemical spill.

Blessings, taken for granted, gifts no one wants, commonly called mixed blessings. Some days feel that rather than divining our good, our higher power is busy divining our demise. Take heart, I think you’re not alone.

Caroline Myss Ph.D. author and medical intuitive gives this picture of a mixed blessing. One day while at home going through your usual routine, bored, you ask yourself for the hundredth time, what’s my life all about, but this time you mean it. Your angel listening begins to take action. She feels it’s definitely time for some changes and gives you three months to make those changes or she will, in her own way. Time slips by. Unwilling to make waves or leave that job that has never suited your higher good, you find yourself having been fired. If that isn’t enough suddenly you find the relationship you are in is very rocky and it flies away as well. Where’s the blessing in that?

True story- A kind man, business partner with two others finds himself confronted one day by his longtime business friends with the fact that he is being put out. The business has been in some serious financial trouble and they offer him a settlement of $10,000 or 35,000 shares of worthless stock in a pet food company. Unsure of what to do he decides he will sleep on it. That night he dreams he is traveling in a Jaguar on a treacherous road with many hills and valleys, but in the end he reaches his destination and all is well. Since the Jaguar is a powerful and cunning cat, he decides this is a sign that he should take the stock in the pet food company. The next day he accepts the 35,00 shares rather than the money because $10,000 won’t begin to touch his debt. In a few short years he turns the pet food company around and has more money and happiness than he could imagine. First came the betrayal, then growth and then the blessing. He credits two things, his angels working through his seemingly ruthless business partners and his dream about driving a Jaguar.

A parable- two Christmas angels while traveling stop at the home of a wealthy couple for the night. The couple is rude offering a meager meal and a cold dusty room in the basement. While there, the wiser angel sees a large hole in the basement wall says nothing but repairs it. The next night they come to rest at the home of a very poor farmer and his wife. They were kind and gentle, offering a wonderful meal and insisted they sleep in their bed so they would be rested for their next day’s journey. Upon arising the next morning they find the farmer’s wife in tears. Their only cow, whose milk had been their sole source of income, lay dead in the field. The younger angel infuriated asks the wiser angel “how could you let such a thing happen? You so kindly repaired the basement wall for those people who offered us so little yet you let these peoples cow die who offered us everything.”

The wise angel answered, ‘ I noticed there was gold stored in that hole in the wall and since the wealthy people were so obsessed by their greed and unwilling to share their good fortune, I sealed the wall so they would find it. Then last night the angel of death came calling for the farmer’s wife. I gave him the cow instead. So things are not always as they seem.’

This holiday if you are dealing with the rocky road of mixed blessings take heart. Although it may not seem so, some angel somewhere is plotting and planning your souls greater good. Till next time blessings to all, Rebecca