I received an email earlier this week from someone who implied that I should remind people that God is in control of everything. I’ve stated this before in past writings, but after writing about a lot of “bad news” this week I think it is a good idea to remind people that God is in control of everything again. I’ll share with you a story of how a seemingly bad event in my dad’s life turned into a major blessing in disguise for us to illustrate to you that God has a plan.
Before I was born my dad lost a small part of one of his fingers in a work-related accident. The accident wasn’t debilitating by any means (although the disability impacts his ability to type), but I’m sure my dad would have preferred to have kept his entire finger intact than to live the rest of his life with one finger that isn’t fully there. Since that accident until the fall of 2003 it seemed that my dad’s partially missing finger was something that he would just have to deal with for the rest of his life without anything really positive coming from his circumstance.
One day in September 2003 my dad was grocery shopping when he encountered a friendly couple. I wasn’t there, but I suppose my dad mentioned that I was readying to attend my first year of college later that month. The couple told my dad about a veteran’s benefit program that would pay for the college tuition of a qualified disabled veteran or the offspring of a qualified disabled veteran. This was major news to him since we had no idea there was such a program in existence (no one in my immediate family had attended college at that point so we were clueless).
My dad and I investigated this veteran’s benefit program and hoped that my dad’s partially missing finger qualified us for the program. We did not have a lot of money to pay for my college education so any tuition assistance would have been welcomed-especially since the cost of education at the school I was going to attend was extremely high. After making a few phone calls and after looking into some medical records we realized that my dad’s partially missing finger likely qualified us for the program. We applied for the program and were quickly approved.
The tuition assistance the benefit program provided enabled me to pursue two undergraduate degrees and a graduate degree at my own pace for virtually no cost. Without the program I probably would still have a degree in Managerial Economics, but I doubt I would've been able to also earn a degree in Political Science and a MBA. I also doubt that I would be able to write about current events and analyze topics at the level of sophistication that I do without the benefit program’s help. One bad development in my dad’s life turned into a major blessing in disguise…
It’s from my personal experience that I can tell you that God is in control of everything no matter how bad events become in our lives or how bad things are around us. There is a reason why events develop the way they develop (good or bad). As we struggle to live, the best we can do is to not lose faith in God and His plan. Little do we know that God may be planning to turn something seemingly bad in the short-term into a major blessing in the long-term.
