May 2, 2007

Call it luck or call it faith

What do you want in life? Okay, so that's a very vague and large question. Let's get a bit more specific. Let me think... What do you want the love of your life to be like? We all have our ideas/our dreams/our hopes. I had an idea of mine. The thing is that the real love of my life turned out to be different than what I had imagined.

Now your thinking. Woah Mary, you're a married woman. Are you saying that your husband isn't the man you want? No, I'm not saying that. The man I married is the perfect man for me. What I'm saying is the process to obtain "my dream" was totally different than what I had in mind. Call it luck or call it faith, but either way my life led me on a path I didn't want to be on, but on a path that lead me to the love of my life.

Things happen in our life that seem like the exact opposite of what we want, but end up having a happy ending. These moments are only obvious in hindsight, and we are able to look fondly on them. I had to quit my job with no prospects of a new job in sight. The day I left that building,
I got a call to start a job that made three times as much money as the one I was leaving. I look back and think how thankful I was to have the faith to quit my job without any idea what the future would be like.

The events that we really struggle with are the ones that even after a few weeks of hindsight have no happy ending. I think of my sister-in-law. She was having a great semester and was already lining up a summer internship in South America to not only have a great job, but also get the research material she desperately needs to write her thesis. Then one night of dancing at a friends wedding has caused her whole future to turn into a large question mark. She hurt her knee to the point that she may have to have surgery and be stuck at home all summer. I assure you this was not the path she thought she would be on, but never the less it is where she has landed. I have faith (that with a little luck) this new path will lead her to the life that makes her happy. It may take years to see the happiness in the new path she has been lead down, but I know it will happen eventually.

This post all started with me wanting to tell the world how amazing my husband is. How he is my world, and how God has blessed me in this union. But an event has knocked me off my feet and lead me to wonder what will be the happy story at the end of my path. Kevin has been asked to live and work in Dallas for at least two weeks (and most likely more) this summer. It made my blood-pressure rise to think that his boss was asking us to miss a month of our first year of marriage, but I have to find peace in this.

Our story started with me being on a path I didn't want, so I have to believe that this will have the same happy result. That this sacrifice will bring us to a better place. Having faith is not easy, and it doesn't always seem to be the most logical, but it is always the best way. It's having faith that something beautiful can come from something ugly. That all our lives have a broken road that leads us to the life we always wanted, but never quite knew what it looked like.