(read somewhere)

Pema Chodron tells a story: A poor family had one son. They loved him beyond measure. He was thrown from a horse and crippled. Two weeks later, the army came to the village and took every able-bodied man to fight in the war. The young man was allowed to stay behind with his family.
The moral: "Life is like that. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know."