In The Beginning, There Was Betrayal

Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of Christ risen.

(Women's Devotional Bible, p.1309)

I keep a journal and have been doing so since January 2007.  I began writing because talking to myself was one way to say things I couldn't say to others.  They didn't want to hear it anyway.  Now, I can look back and read about how it was - not that I have forgotten - but at times I wrote about my hopes for a normal? good? future that was very uncertain. 

January 2007.  My oldest son was getting married in New Hampshire where we (his father, me - his mother, sister and younger brother) lived.  We had moved from Florida and bought a home in May of 2005.  My husband had insisted on buying a franchise and started a business after retiring early from the police department.  We had been married for 24 years and had 4 kids.  We had decided it was time to leave Florida's crime and overcrowding to come back to our native New England where our families were - mostly his.  My son who was getting married lived in Kentucky, but his wife also had family in New Hampshire.

I wish I could remember my last normal day, but as always you just don't know it's coming.  The huge thing that will knock you off your "plane" of life.   It was a week before the big wedding when my husband came home from his day at the business and said he needed to talk to me.  He never wanted to talk to me, so I wondered what was up.  I never believed he would make the business work, because he is not a hard worker or a businessman.  I was hoping he was going to say he was selling it.  Instead he said that he had filed bankruptcy.  Yup, he had been spending the last few months running the business into the ground until there was nothing left.  And he never said a word to me - his wife and partner- until it was too late to try to save something.

We did the wedding thing without any money - the kids got no wedding gift - and with the thought of losing our home looming.  And I knew that my marriage was over.  It hadn't been a very good one up to that point - my husband liked to do his own thing (ya think?) and keep me in the dark.  I was the voice of reason and he was the little boy who just wanted to have a good time- at anyone's expense it seemed.  What kind of man puts his wants above the safety of his family?  It was a real eye-opener to see how truly selfish and stupid he was.  I'd had enough.

I found a place for all of us to rent and we moved out of our last home in summer so my son could start school by Fall another new town.  I couldn't find a place to rent in the town where we had lived.  My fall into the pit had begun.  I didn't fall all at once.  I was too busy with so much to take care of.  My main concern was my children and once again they were uprooted and now for the first time in their lives they had no place to call home.  It was a nightmare.

The journal I began in January 2007 has three words on the front:  imagine, hope and believe.  Then it says, "With God all things are possible".
I named it "My book of hope through the horrors".