Sometimes Blessings Come From Unexpected Places

I'm taking a break from grading midterms for my "Touchstones of Western Literature" course. One of three options that my students had was to write an analysis of the story in Genesis chapter 22, where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. I was pleasantly surprised at how many students chose this particular option. I was even more pleasantly surprised by the insight of their responses. So many of them pointed out that doing what we are supposed to do is difficult but that we are blessed in the end, blessed precisely because we do the difficult thing. I suppose this is exactly what I needed to hear, yet I didn't expect to find it among a set of sophomore-level midterms.

It so often strikes me that what we need comes from a source we wouldn't have expected.