Gifts aren’t hard to find when we look for them. They really are all around us. One of the gifts God recently gave me was my cat who woke me up about 6 AM one morning by running to the window. I got up and looked out the window to see what he was focused on and there was a fawn right by my bedroom window eating a leaf off the nearby flora. It was incredible! Then seconds later, the mother walked by my window and she and the baby ran off towards my kitchen window; so I got up and looked out and saw a group of other mothers with their babies. It reminded me of a park where all the mothers gather with their children, as they sit and talk while their children play.

Sometimes the pain God allows in your life results in the gift of new and wonderful friendships. People who don’t know you or acquaintances who have not previously had a conversation with you, tend to reach out when tragedy comes into your life. These new relationships can result in friendships that last a lifetime because people tend to bond when they are real with each other rather than try to hide their emotions.

Sometimes your disappointment can be turned around into a gift if God is trying to teach you something. Have you ever prayed for God to change something about yourself? You might have thought He would just make the change in you painlessly overnight or gradually and inperceptively. But sometimes God works through disappointment or not allowing us to have our own way. If we are open to what God can teach us through disappointment, we might find that, through the disappointment we feel coming from others, He answered a prayer we prayed some time ago.

Gifts can come when you disappoint someone. If you care about someone and you disappoint them, you often make an extra effort to be more sensitive to their needs moving forward. A friend confided in my recently that she was disappointed that no one threw her a surprise party or any kind of a party when she turned sixty. This was painful because being one of her friends, I felt that somehow I should have picked up on her desire to have a surprise party. But sometimes we are so caught up in our own lives that we miss how we can be a blessing to another person.

New friendships, old friendships and self improvement prayers can all result in gifts from our Father. In fact, we seem to learn best through painful circumstances; either the painful circumstances that God allows; pain caused by disappointment from others, and pain from dissapointment we caused to someone else. If we have an open, sensitive heart we can learn from pain as we allow it to penetrate into our core. And if our goal is to live our life honoring God, then we will accept these types of painful circumstances as a gift from the Author and Perfector of our faith.

So I’m thankful for the pain and disappointment God allows in my life. I’ve developed many wonderful lifelong friendships through pain. I’ve learned how to be more like Christ and I hope to make some changes in my life that will not only benefit me, but will benefit the people I care about the most. These are all gifts from my Father. They arrived later in my life, but as long as I am still here on this earth, God has something to teach me. Nothing comes to you except through what God allows. Just read the book of Job to learn more about that!