Good Morning friends! I belong to a great scrapbooking group called ScrapbookingPizzaz and Esther and I were discussing challenges. She was inspired to start a journaling challenge.
Journal Topic: Your thoughts and opinions on this topic: Everything happens for a reason, right?
(You can journal/write/draw/paint etc in a notebook book, journal, or word processor (Google Docs would work too!) on your computer or in your blog)
11/01/2010
I absolutely believe everything happens for a reason. I can look around me and see where choices were placed in my life and I acted on them. Some positively and others I regret. Sometimes I regret acting and sometimes I regret not acting on them and not following my gut.
For example, almost seven years ago I was single and going through a hard time. My adult daughter literally bullied me into joining match.com, totally against my will. I ‘met’ a few guys on there and they seemed nice enough, but none that I really felt a connection with. Mostly, I felt they were just players. My 30-day free trial was about over and I was going to just delete my account I had a message from a guy named Chris.
We chatted via email and then on the phone. You can imagine my anxiety when it came time to actually meet in person! We met at a local coffee shop late one afternoon and I’d scheduled with my oldest daughter to call me in 45 minutes. If I said I Oh no, I’ll be right home! Then things weren’t going well. If I said something like, oh no problem, I’ll grab someone my way home, then it was going well. She called and laughed and teased me from the other end of that call while I was calmly saying, yeah I can stop and grab that on the way home.
I hung up and Chris asked if that was a check-in call. OH!!!! I felt the heat hit my face and all I could do was laugh and admit it. He offered up that he was glad I didn’t feel the need to rush off.
I married that man two years later 🙂
There were major changes in my life that led up to that point.
- I moved states. I packed up and left everything I knew. It was hard leaving family, friends, familiarity and a decent job in Montana to move to North Dakota where I’d never lived before.
- I ended a long term, bad for me, relationship and took a huge step of faith by walking away from our house and renting an apartment.
- I had to find the confidence to actually meet the man behind the text at the coffee shop that day.
I look back now and see that because I took a chance at each fork in the road, I am now where I am. I took a chance on a man I met online, a very scary proposition and one I don’t actually recommend. However, I am happily married and added a young stepson to the family.
It isn’t always easy to see why things happen, sometimes we may never know why. It is always easy to know that God is in control and even when difficult things happen, He is there.
All of the experiences in my life have forged me into the strong, independent, reliable woman I am today.