Crises and Blessings

I once heard someone say that life-change can only occur as the result of a crisis. I don’t remember the argument or the supporting evidence, but it sounded and felt like truth so I believed it . And maybe I still do.
A couple of weeks ago everyone in our church was challenged to begin daily readings and exercises in a book titled "One Month to Live, thirty days to a no-regrets life". The point of this book is to discover how you would live differently if you knew you had only one month left to live, and to make the indicated changes.
At first I rejected the idea of the book completely. “You can’t pretend to have a crisis or imagine what a crisis would feel like,” was the argument that I presented to my imaginary antagonist, “that would be too easy.”
My opponent in this debate made several very compelling arguments that I was forced to consider objectively. “But every Bible story I can think of from Adam and Eve, to Abraham and Sarah, to Christ in Gethsemane is about a crisis!”, I countered, “there’s never an easy path to a significant result.” “Nothing is impossible with God” was the trump card that he played to end each successive round of our dispute.
I was walking home for lunch one day recently, arguing both sides of my debate and making no progress at all. The noon-time sun, shining through the leafless treetops caused me to shed my heavy coat. I instantly thought of Aesops Fable: The Contest between the Sun and the Wind. And that made me think of how gradually and gracefully the seasons change. And it wasn’t a crisis that persuaded me to shed that heavy coat, but a blessing.
Maybe I should read the rest of the book.