I wrote a short story once about a man who lived his life carrying around a large sack of stones. This sack bent his back, contorted his body, and hardened his spirit. Then one day he met a little girl who asked to see inside the sack. She gently pulled out a stone, buried it in the ground, and from it a beautiful tree emerged. As it turns out, they were not stones after all. They were seeds, meant to be blessings to make his life's journey easier. The man had not understood this, and had instead carried what he saw as stones with bitterness and resentment, unnecessarily burdened by the weight he carried. The gifts within the seeds were always there, but the man had to look with different eyes and choose to plant the seeds they truly were. That is the way all challenges work. We can carry them our whole lives, or we can cultivate the gifts that lie dormant within through looking with a different perspective and transforming the stone into a seed of grace.
