I had just been fired. Now I had to go home and share what happened with my wife.
When I opened my front door, I was greeted by the maintenance guy from my apartment complex fixing my dishwasher disposal. I tried to be polite and cheerful to him. I was waiting for him to leave so I could sit in silence for a few hours—before my wife got home. I wanted to process it all before telling her. I felt ashamed. Plus I wanted to present it in a way that wouldn’t cause her to worry about our finances.
Then my wife walked in the door. She was home early from school.
“Hey babe!” she greeted me cheerily. It was awkward with the maintenance guy in the room to be too expressive. “You’re home early. How’d you swing that?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I didn’t want to tell her at that moment, because it probably would have been awkward for him to overhear. But I also didn’t want to lie to her. “Well…I’ll tell you later.”
I walked to the bedroom hoping to avoid a further conversation. She pursued me. “Is everything okay?”
“It’ll be okay. Just something weird happened at work today.”
I’m apparently horrible at acting like everything is okay, because she read it on my face. “Were you fired?”
I nodded my head. We sat in silence. She didn’t comfort me because we didn’t want the maintenance guy to walk in on that weird moment. We sat. And waited. It was probably twenty minutes before he finally left.
As soon as he shut the door, I buried my face into the pillows on our bed and cried. She laid next to me and hugged me. I never cry. But I cried for about ten minutes. Ten minutes of silent tears.
Then I stopped. I took a deep breath and I sat up. Things were going to be okay. I thanked my wife for the comfort, then I told her what happened.
She was very quick to get angry at my former boss. “How could they do that to you? Why would they hire you if they weren’t sure what they wanted from the conference? You did exactly what you told them you would do when they hired you. They don’t realize what they just did!” I understood and even related to what she was saying. But I didn’t want to focus on that.
You see; it was weird. But as I was being fired, I actually started to get excited. In the same moment my world was crumbling down, I saw exciting things in my future. I realized I’d been given an opportunity. I saw mixtures of bright sunlight in the fog of what I was going through.
I’ve always believe pain is an opportunity. Through pain we learn and we’re forced into new territory. I’ve always believed that new territory was an opportunity from God. Now I had the opportunity to walk that out.
The key to enduring pain is to seek the new opportunity presented within. That isn’t something someone else can give you. It’s something you discover. It’s something you find as you seek God and seek His plan in the situation.