Unexpected grace

The other morning I received a lovely message from a dear friend of mine who lives in the UK.  It was touching, and I felt so blessed by her thoughts, generating outwards towards me from so far away.

We don't get to talk to each other often, and we haven't seen each other in years.  Roger and I visited her when we traveled through London on our honeymoon.  She and I exchange messages from time to time.  But there's always a sense, for me, that I have a sister out there, and that she's got my back psychically, as I have hers.

We worked together for only a few months at one of the most insane jobs I've ever had.  Out of boredom and a sense of not being challenged enough, I had changed from one department to another within this huge IT group I had been with for years.  The shift in stress and dysfunction was so staggering that I was in the hospital 10 days after starting the job.  I had been stress eating a bag of trail mix after enduring the umpteenth antagonistic, hostile, unresolved meeting of the day, and by the time I got home I was doubled up in pain.  I ended up writhing on the bathroom floor and was in surgery the next day; a piece of scar tissue had wrapped around an intestine and the influx of massive amounts of trail mix got me into a fix.

It was that kind of a job.

I met Gail while working on that team.  She was a breath of fresh air and soon she, and another woman on the team, Lin, and I bonded tightly.  We were foxhole comrades, finding our only solace from the incredibly bad working conditions in each other.

That was many years ago.  We all quit that job in short order but we will always have that bond.  And as I reread (and reread) her message the other morning, I thought back to those chaotic beginnings and realized again how often really amazingly good things tend to emerge from situations that we would almost always call extremely negative.

That surgery was an intense experience, much like the one I'm going through now.  But by the time I was done recovering from that, I was open enough in mind and spirit to enter into a relationship with Roger.  I was also clear enough from that experience to know exactly what I could and couldn't deal with, where my boundaries should be, and what I wanted from life.  During that horrible time, I gained invaluable perspectives which I will treasure for the rest of my life, along with the friendships I forged.

Obviously, I don't and won't go out of my way to enter into intensely unpleasant and painful experiences.  But when I'm gripped with fear at 4 a.m., assailed by a battery of "what if" thoughts, maybe it can help me get back to sleep to remember that it almost never is as bad as I project it is going to be, that there are many good moments interspersed with the bad ones, and that incredible grace is usually found in the most unexpected places.