A Fourteen-Years Lesson

Recess, two weeks prior to my seventeenth birthday: January 16, 1997.

Everything went normal at school that fine morning, except for a simple notification that said I was expected at the staff's office.
I walked briskly up the stairs, opened the door, and was told, "We've prepared the car for you, Shinta. You need to get home immediately. Your brother just passed away."

How would you feel if that news was directed to you?

For me, it was as if the entire world collapsed.
Receiving the message that my eldest brother died, five months after my dad's funeral, simply didn't make any sense.

How much probability one could suggest?
One in a thousand?
That's 0.001 chance!
But it did happen -- one out of a thousand chance.

Cardiac arrest.
He was 28.

I was overwhelmed.
I was broken to pieces.
I was grieved beyond belief.

But the strange thing was: I didn't ask "why."
I didn't know why I didn't question anything or blamed anyone.
There was nothing I did but went on with life, no matter how tearfully painful and drenched in sorrow it had been.

I was 16!
I hadn't had the wisdom to understand that when faced to Fate, asking "why" wouldn't solve anything or did any good.
It was the "how" that mattered.

Fourteen years afterwards, I look back and finally understand:

- How I learned to stand on my own.
- How to search for rainbows beyond the clouds.
- How to stop being a spoiled little girl, grow up, and take responsibility over my own choices.
- How to have faith for a better future when the present doesn't seem to be promising much.
- How to build everything from zero and enjoy the fruit of my own labor.

He was gone and left me shattered.
But he had gone to a much better place.
And from the debris of heartbreak, I rose up and turned into someone new.

Sometimes, the very thing that breaks us to pieces, rebuilds us twice stronger -- depending on how we give the right response.
Now I know, that in all things, God works for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28).

Somewhere, I see beyond the clouds, over the rainbow: skies are blue.