Happily Ever After

Once upon a time...and they lived happily ever after. Almost every fairy tale begins and ends with those words. "Once upon a time," there was someone who needed something, was lacking in some way, and in the end, that person's need was filled, and "they lived happily ever after." The demons of life were slain, forever put to rest, and only a bright future remained.

In the "real" world, though, as Rob Thomas sings so accurately, "nobody told you it was gonna be hard!" Life is littered with beautiful, happy moments that bring tears of joy to your eyes; however, life is also full of difficult, wilderness times that bring tears of pain or emptiness to those same eyes. To me, the hardest part of this journey of life is that those wilderness times usually catch me by total surprise. I'm never quite prepared for the dry, desolate, sometimes painful desert, but it always arrives, usually knocking me to my knees.

As I walk through my own wilderness right now, I am continually trying to determine when I first stepped into the dry sand. Unfortunately, it seems that I walked for quite a while before my thirst overtook me, before I realized that I had indeed entered the desert. As I look around me for an oasis, for my "happily ever after," the blowing sand has clouded my vision. My mind is full of thoughts, running into one another, constantly moving, yet never being able to identify how I got here or where to find the lush garden of respite I so desperately need.

I'm not depressed, but I am concerned. I am concerned about each of my children. I am concerned about my husband. I am concerned about our family as a whole. I am constantly going to God, pointing to the miracles in the past, praising Him for those, and asking for His touch in my life and in the lives of those living in my home. I do know that He will show up in a mighty way, but I'm uncertain when that will be and how He will do it. Will He take me from this wilderness in a grand way, or will the journey be long and painful? Will the result be the one for which I am asking, or will His plan differ greatly?

The Scriptures tell me that "I WILL see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living," and I bank on that each day. In eternity, I am assured of my happily ever after; however, here on Earth, I'm sad to admit that, to me, happily ever after is only for fairy tales.