Pushing Through The Unexpected

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Two good friends of mine from college got married on the same day almost eleven years ago. I had to choose only one wedding to attend, and it turns out I chose the right one.

My out of town friend called me four years into his marriage to let me know that his wife had left him. She had simply decided that she didn't love him anymore - if she ever had - and that she wanted her own life back in Chicago.

While he was devastated, he wasn't accepting it. There was nothing to precipitate it, and no reason she couldn't work through it. He decided to support her and let her work through it to realize that it was something else in her life that she was dissatisfied with and not him.

The parallels between that situation and the one described in This Is Not The Story You Think It Is by Laura Munson where she goes through her day by day personal tragedy after her husband gave her the same news.

At least publicly, my friend dealt with his grief gracefully. He continued moving forward with his life, maintaining interests and creating new ones. In the end, his wife became his ex-wife, and he dealt with that well - and is now married with an almost one year old child.

When I think about the pain that he had to have been going through, his complete faith inspires me. He's like me in that he prefers life to be well-ordered and predictable (yeah, with children, that gets stretched a bit), but he always knew he would be happy and that he could find his way to peace again, moving forward just one day at a time.

I'll be honest that there are days when my life isn't the peaches and roses I wish it were. There are days I wish I were still single and in the city with only myself as a responsibility. And there are days my husband drives me batty and I dream about a husband who can magically read my mind. But I know that I wouldn't change what I have if I could - and that faith keeps me grounded.

This post was inspired by "This Is Not The Story You Think It Is" by Laura Munson, which I received as part of the Left to Write book club. We do not do book reviews but rather write about something the book inspires (and no, I would not recommend this book, as a side note).