I asked myself, “How can you learn to love your life?”
If you are just joining us, you can see how I came to ask myself this question
by reading Day 1 of this series.

Our little family had military moves/deployments/separations, broken relationships along with family drama, and a dose of chronic health concerns.

When you’ve been riding in a rocking boat for a long time,
you will still feel that rocking motion
once you’ve landed on solid ground.

Chaos had become our “normal.” We lived at op-tempo—in the military this means a constant state of readiness in terms of crisis response. That sounds like a good thing, but it can make you pretty jumpy.

Writing became a way for me to find answers to the tough questions that had hounded me from childhood and got more persistent in marriage:

• Maybe God doesn’t see you, maybe you don’t matter to Him?
• If God does love you, why won’t He protect you from hurt?
• If God knows best, why’s your life a mess? Can’t He manage things better than this?
• If God sees into your heart, how could He love you?  (And see, now we are back to the first question and we start the whole thing over again…)

I found those answers in God’s Word, wrote about them here, my family grew in faith, and life did settle down. Crises were fewer and we had more time in between them. Reconciliation was difficult, but possible. Yet something remained amiss.

I had folded up my feelings, stuffed them into carry-on cases, in my heart. I walked around that way, ready to pick up and go at the first sign of trouble. This was not real leaving. I just took mental trips to places like: you’ll be sorry one day and I don’t really need you anyway, with stops at I’ll never forget that and were you raised by wolves?

All of that was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I couldn’t stay in that negative place. I had commit to change:

• Love God: when I spend my time and thoughts on the Lord, I don’t have to look for it because joy finds me
• Love your peeps: God has given me amazing family and friends. None of them is perfect (sorry, y’all), so if I spend my time thinking about every little grievance, I will miss all the good parts.
• Love God enough to love the hard-to-love peeps: some people are flat-out odious. Talking with them leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Thinking about them gets me riled up because they bring more grief than good. But, the only power they have is what I give them. And, since I have an inheritance in heaven, I’m like the rich kid at school, and I can afford to be generous with them.
• Keep an eye on the time because it’s racing by like an avalanche. My kids are more than half-way gone. They’ll be in college before I know it. I have too many gray hairs and my hubby is about to retire from the military. Time…I used to have so much of it, and now it seems to be evaporating!

Do you have a short list of reminders that help you to love your life? I would love to hear about them here!

You can find all the posts for this series here!