How Terrible! Or Is it?

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Is what you see, always what you see?
Actually, it hardly ever is (kind of like the photo attached to this article -- what do you see?).
There's a great story here.
There was a farmer and he had a horse. The horse ran away.
"How terrible!" said the townspeople.
But the horse came back, and it brought a herd of other horses with it. The farmer's wealth multiplied. 
"How wonderful!" said the townspeople.
But the farmer's son was rounding up the horses, and broke his leg, rendering him useless to the farmer for weeks on end.
"How terrible!" said the townspeople.
The king's men came through the village, recruiting all the able-bodied men and carrying them off to fight the king's war, but the son was not able to go due to his temporarily broken leg.
"How wonderful!" said the townspeople.
... you get the gist of it. We never really know where the twists and turns and roller-coaster loops of life take us.
Unfortunately, our friends and relatives and even complete strangers offer comments when they think we're in a tough situation that are meant to be sympathetic, but are actually often just negative and not helpful. 
Use those comments as questions instead of automatically taking them as the true interpretation. So your horse (job, wife) ran away.
IS it terrible? Or is it opening an opportunity you'd been sort of waiting for anyway?

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