SAGE ADVICE

Vignette:  I was a child with dual citizenship, dual because of my parents identity yet toddling first steps on my parents foreign soil, speaking my first words in Spanish and toilet training, with a nanny, simply responding to what was happening at the moment.
This was the framework from which I later interpreted life and tried to make sense of life.
Being fair skinned, blue eyed, and blonde, I looked different. I was treated like a porcelain doll.

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"In the wake of shattered dreams, do you wonder how you will keep going? ~ Sheridan Yoysey

 SAGE ADVICE

They say "love is blind and marriage is an eye opener."

What do you do when the door shuts on perceived dreams of marriage?

What do you do when those expectations about the future don't live up to those dreams and aspiriations?
It has been an unsettling journey for me.

  Sage Advice: The three most powerful sentences; "I love you.", "I was wrong.", and "I'm working on it." and I'm always working on it.

Life travels on unpredictable roads, even the most unpredictable becomes predictable.

1975

It is devastating to see a lifetime of independence slowly disolve into a one-way dependency.  Death, lean times, job loss, illness, hard times, health issues,  and then responsibility shifts.
It gets harder because of health yet you would think it would be easier because of already gone through harder, ugly moments, and yes, stayed together.
Shouldn't the accumulated survival aspects, day after day, week after week, year after year shake one less and less?  Perhaps.
It's been a long time since I put on that wedding dress,

floating from one life event to another, the "first" highs, the "first" lows, the "first haves", and the "have nots" and "never will haves".  Sigh.

  We tick them off the calendar as milestones.  What's next?  We grow old and life intervenes.

First Baby

Years of "wedded bliss" have a tendency to reveal inner uglyness.  I work hard to understand myself.  I work to understand him.  Another dimension of life had never been on my radar.  When the reality sank in and the emotional highs wore out, I now had to navigate the challenges of that "wedded bliss".  My quest to provide better support turned into an in-depth learning journey.  I was not married to a husband that I had always wanted but to someone who had no idea how to go with flow.
 Lost the glow and grace of youth long ago and time marches on.  God has not brought me this far to abandon.
I would probably miss the breaking and chiseling and refining meant for me if I had not proactively thanked God for what he has chosen for me.
What makes life so difficult is affected by my sin and wedded to a sinner.

1975

Sage advice:  "Don't wait for the other to get their act together.  Focus on your commitment and forge on in a moment-by-moment, day-to-day understanding of what you need to do at the moment."

The allure of comparison to others lives is always there, starved for encouragement, starved for accolades, and starved for affirmation.

 ^"That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." ~2 Corinthians 12:10

The Bible makes it crystal clear that my sins are forgiven because Jesus died.  Without this fact, I would be very discouraged.

 ^"This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." ~I John 4:10

Sage Advice:  Love rejoices in what is true and looks for the best. (1Cor.13:4-7)
You can't believe all things and hope all things when you assume the worst of people and live your life with such misguided animosity.
 Do all things we hope for point to the idols of the heart?
Am I putting my hopes in the wrong things? 

1980

The things I yearn for will not happen at least not in the foreseen future.

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." ~2 Corinthians 4:18

The other day, I was drawn to a remark Jesus made in Mark 12:24 "Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God."

1992 ?

 Marital adjustments during this season of life continue, not to say I have not been making adjustment all along but when you spend years trying to figure it out and only now have found the missing puzzle piece after countless encounters of conventional counseling did not produce results.  By the grace of God, we have gone through hard falls and failures.  We have slogged through seasons of questioning and doubt.  We have navigated through the rough water by trusting God in a greater way than before.

Sage Advice:  "Is it me?"  "If it's me, what can I do?"  "If its him, there's nothing I can do."

2019

But for the fact that God loved us could explain the determination to make it work.