Living the Dream, One Nightmare at a Time

If you would’ve asked me when we got married what our lives would look like in a decade I would’ve said something like this…

I saw Carter and I married with a handful of kiddos, both through pregnancy and adoption.

We would be living outside of a small town, with a bit of land and owning a pet or two.

We would have travelled the world.

 I would be staying at home with my kids, possibly working a day or two outside the home. I thought Carter would be working in the finance world and I hoped that he would enjoy his job.

Of course, I planned on being more in love with my husband than ever.

You want to hear something crazy?

 Every single one of the things that I hoped for my life is my reality.

However...

Even though so many wonderful things have happened, I can honestly say that in the past decade there have been so many things that I did not expect to be part of our journey.

I never expected to come home one day and find that someone had broken into our home. Stealing several thousands of dollars’ worth of memories.

I never expected to wake up one morning and realize my house was quickly becoming an island. We had minutes to get out of our house. One car already totaled from the water.

I never expected our house to catch on fire.

I never realized how many days would be dedicated to the broken appliances and a car that needs to go to the shop.

I never anticipated our dog getting hit by the car and the kitties running away.

I never expected Carter to lose his job after the recession hit.

I sure never saw the friendships that would be no longer.

I never expected to take it so brutally hard when we had our failed adoption.

I didn’t expect the whole parenting thing to be so challenging. I never expected so many tears to come with it, both from my children and myself.

I didn’t realize how many different seasons you experience as a married couple. The moments where you look into each other’s eyes and question one another’s actions, intentions or love. I never thought that I would have days where I really questioned the whole gig.

I never realized that there would not just be hard days… but there would be hard years.

You see, when I looked ahead at my life I saw all the moments of the mountaintops. I didn’t see the valleys.

I saw all of my dreams coming true… but I never realized that the same life that would make my dreams come true would be the very life that brought forth my nightmares.

My friends, life is both extremely wonderful and extremely difficult. We have moments on the mountaintops and moments on the valleys. I don’t think we need to fear the valleys, but I do think we need to understand that they will be part of our journey to the top.

If you find yourself in a valley today. Keep your head up. Try to find beauty right where you are. Where you are today, is not where you will always be, but where you are today is part of the journey to where you are going.

And that my friend, is a beautiful thing.

Would you like to read more about my views on relationships and life? click here.

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Finding Happiness in Our Lives

Most of us have things that we want to happen in our lives. We have our plans. We have our goals. We have our hopes.

What about right now? Are you enjoying your life? Are you content? Are you happy? If not, why? At times, it can feel like the reason we aren’t happy is because we don’t have everything we want.

“If I only had this or that, I would be content.”

“If only this would happen, I would be happy.”

Once I finish school… or get a better job… or get married… or have kids… or get a bigger house… or a different spouse… or get more vacation time… or a new boss… or a nicer car… or more money… or… Once ____ happens I will finally be happy.

So is that how it works? Is happiness found in us getting everything that we want?

I don’t think so.

How often have we thought something would make us happy, but then it came and it didn’t satisfy us? Or, it made us happy for a while, but then we found ourselves no longer content and needing more. I wonder how many moments of our life we have missed because we were waiting for the next thing… the “better” thing.

Happiness is not found in getting what we want.

Happiness is found in being appreciative for what we have.

We must find a way to be content with what we have today. If we never find a way to be content in our “today’s” we will never be able to be content with our “tomorrow’s”.

I am afraid that too many of us have an idea in our mind that we will one day *arrive* to our happy place and then life will be wonderful.

We don’t *arrive* to our happiness.

We choose it.

We must stop believing the lie that our circumstances must change for us to be happy. True happiness comes when we can find a way to be appreciative, despite the fact that our circumstances are not perfect.

I have come to realize that perfection in life is a fleeting condition.

I am all for having goals and dreams, but these are things that should give us hope, not discouragement. We must find a way to live peacefully with both, our desires for the future and the reality of our present life.

We can't always get what we want, but we can choose to be appreciative for what we have.

Our discontentment is in our perception, but thankfully, we hold the keys to changing that.

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