One phone call ends a marriage you thought was safe. The boxes appear on your desk; the email from HR says your role is redundant. A doctor sits down, takes a breath, and quietly redraws the rest of your life with a diagnosis you never expected.

None of us is a stranger to that moment when the ground opens, and the future you planned disappears in a sentence.

Sometimes the blow is public – a betrayal splashed across social media, a business you’ve poured your savings into collapses.

Sometimes it’s quieter: the child who drifts away, the dream that simply never materialises.

These are not minor inconveniences. They are real losses, and they can leave you wondering whether life is indifferent at best and cruel at worst.

And yet, there is another way to read these same events. Some people, including many of history’s wisest voices, have chosen to believe – stubbornly, even defiantly – that whatever comes their way can somehow be turned to their good.

The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps and later wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, observed: “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

Believing that everything ultimately happens for your benefit does not mean calling evil “good” or denying grief. It means holding a quiet conviction that, given enough time and courage, even the worst season can be woven into a story that strengthens you, deepens your compassion, or redirects your life toward a better path.

There is the ancient story of Joseph. As a teenager, he was nearly murdered by his brothers, then sold into slavery in a foreign land. There he worked faithfully, only to be falsely accused and thrown into prison.

Years later, his ability to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams lifted him from prison to the highest levels of power, where he organised grain reserves that would save thousands during a brutal famine – including the very family who betrayed him. When he finally faced them again, he didn’t seek revenge; he saw, instead, that what they had meant for harm had positioned him to preserve their lives.

In our own time, another man was brought low by success.

In 1985, Steve Jobs was forced out of the company he had co‑founded, Apple. Publicly humiliated, stripped of his role, he easily could have concluded that his best years were behind him. Instead, he started over, founding NeXT and investing in Pixar – ventures that sharpened his vision and leadership. When he eventually returned to Apple, he led the creation of products that reshaped modern life, from the iMac to the iPhone.

Looking back, he said that being fired from Apple was “the best thing that could have ever happened to me” because it freed him to start again as a beginner.

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was in a horrific bus accident that shattered her spine and pelvis and left her in constant pain. Confined to bed, she began to paint, using a special easel her mother had rigged so she could work lying down. Out of that shattered body emerged some of the most distinctive art of the twentieth century – work that turned her private suffering into images of fierce, defiant beauty.

Joseph, Jobs, Kahlo – their lives are wildly different, yet they share a quiet refusal to let tragedy have the final word. The belief that “everything happens for my benefit” does not suggest that betrayal, illness, or injustice are good. It says instead: “I will not waste this.” I will hunt for the wisdom hidden inside it. I will allow this pain to carve out more courage, more clarity, more heart.

Here is the invitation, wherever you are reading this today: Take one hardship in your life – maybe the very one that tightens your chest when you think of it – and quietly decide that, somehow, it will be woven into your good. Remember this, as you walk forward: You do not control everything that happens to you, but you can choose to believe that whatever comes your way, ultimately happens for your benefit.

• Toby Moore is a Shaw Local News Network columnist, star of the Emmy-nominated film “A Separate Peace,” and CEO of CubeStream Inc. He can be reached at feedback@shawmedia.com.