Receiving gifts is not one of my love languages. Like, at all. But even so, I know a beautiful gift when I see one. Since I was a little girl, I could easily recognize a professionally wrapped present from a home-wrapped gift. Our family couldn’t ever have afforded to buy gifts at a department store, where they offered gift-wrapping. So I knew the professionally wrapped gifts, would be the most expensive.
I would be thrilled with anticipation, even before I opened them.
Even though some turned out to be things like expensive, ugly Christmas sweaters, I was still drawn to the most beautiful packages first. I would venture to guess that’s true for you too. Most of us have been conditioned, our entire lives, to believe the best gifts come in the most beautiful packages.
It’s an awful bait and switch.
It’s usually only as we grow older, we begin to experience the truth that life’s greatest gifts often come through struggle. They’re not wrapped in a little blue box from Tiffany’s or a fancy department store bow. They’re wrapped in things like crisis, loss, difficulty, frustration and confusion.
If we were presented our struggles, on the front end as a gift, none of us would want to open them.
We’d be quick to pass those over, in search of the alluring packages that surely await somewhere in the distance. They’re an invitation to grow beyond our current limits. They challenge us to become stronger and wiser than we were before. They test our limits and if we persist, they prove that we are often stronger than we think.
Our struggles are the gifts that make us who we’re meant to be.
This have proven true in my life time, and time again. It certainly doesn’t make it easier, in the middle of the struggle or looking down the barrel of potentially years of more struggle. But I can take the next step knowing, the struggle is making me.
It’s making you too.
The next time you see a wise, strong, and beautifully courageous woman, instead of assuming she was handed a professionally wrapped gift, think again. Learn a little more. Remember that strength is the sign of a struggle.
It’s the gift no one wants to open.
But it’s the best gift, indeed.
to more love,
Crystal
