When Gold Falls From the Sky

I once heard a supposedly true story about a man who was casually walking down the streets of a large city when something hit him on the shoulder and knocked him down. Although his shoulder was very painful and probably broken, he looked around for his assailant. Seeing nobody close to him, he looked beside him on the sidewalk and there lay a shoebox, securely wrapped in duct tape.

Someone nearby called an ambulance and the man was taken to the hospital to be checked over; but before he left, he grabbed the weighty shoebox and tucked it under his good arm as evidence. While in the emergency room, he opened the shoebox and found three gold bars each wrapped in a cloth. The police were called, examined the box, and assumed that it had either fallen out of an airplane or out of a nearby high rise. They figured that the gold had been stolen jewellery which had been melted down for profit.

After doing some thorough investigation and finding no claimant for the three gold bars, six months after the accident, the victim was awarded the gold as his legal “finders keepers” possession!

Most of us would be willing to suffer a sore shoulder if we were to end up with a few pounds of gold bars but the results can be similar when we are hit with weighty trials of life. The end product can often be more valuable than gold!

This principle needs to be embedded in our children right from the time they are toddlers. For example, when my two year-old grandson was playing outside he fell and scraped up his knee. His first response after the accident was to look at his mom to get a reading on how worried he should be. If mom were to react with a scream and a call to 911, it would teach Maxwell that he should react emotionally when bad things happen.

But my daughter didn’t react emotionally; she remained calm and caring. That did at least two things: She set a tone for how traumatic the injury was to be perceived and would give her son the space and energy he needed to deal positively with his sore leg. Second, after Kelly had attended to the wound, she used the crisis as a teaching point for her toddler. Thus, rather than the accident being a crisis, it became a stepping stone.

Re-enforcing the principle throughout a child’s or teen-ager’s life will help them learn to respond to crises as opportunities for growth and maturing. Later on, whether it is a serious accident, illness, financial set back or broken relationship, we learn that there are often gold bars wrapped up in the cardboard box that knocked us off our feet!

It's never to late to learn how to deal with setbacks in our lives. In fact, a friend of mine calls them sitbacks. When troubles come, she sits back and reflects on what is happening to her and tries to figure our what she can learn from the experience. Next time trouble finds you, why don't you try that? Think about what you can learn from your crisis and maybe even how you can help someone else. May you find at least a gold nugget or two, if not an entire gold bar.

Have a great weekend!

Barry