~little did we know~

~and life goes on~

It took me quite a while to understand what it meant when someone told me once that unanswered prayers are actually a good thing.  I remember looking at my friend with a quizzical and unbelieving look on my face, wondering where she came up with that idea.  Many years and several thousand unanswered prayers later, I began to get it and started to realize that what my lifelong friend was saying was indeed the very truth.

I have learned, sometimes the extremely hard way~the "I'm going to have to lay you upon the mighty anvil" kind of way, that unanswered prayers are really a gift from the good Lord above.

It's coming up now almost 5 years since Mike and I were married and every once in a while that is still hard to imagine.  Never was the life I am living now even on the radar.   Believe me, I never sat at home in Kansas and prayed this prayer.

"Lord, please help me connect with someone I might have known from high school 40 years ago and haven't seen since.  It's ok if you uproot me from my home of forever here in Kansas.  I want to go and see the world, well at least Colorado, Texas, and Oklahoma.  Amen."
Kid you not.  It never happened.

My prayer for life was on a much different path back then and none of it involved getting married to Mike, moving away, teaching children in the mountains of southwestern Colorado or the plains of Texas and Oklahoma.  Day after day I kept wondering what the problem was.  Why was it that God hadn't heard me asking for those things that I felt would have been a good life for me?  And of course, the answer is that He is much wiser than I would ever even think of professing to be.  The plan for a little girl from Kansas named "Peggy" was going to take a different course and everything would work out just fine, if only I would let it.

And so we are here, along the Red River and living the life that was my destiny all along.  When things fell into place, everything happened just as it should.  All my prayers of hoping for anything different went unanswered, thank goodness.

Actually, thank God.

It had been a long time since I saw this photo taken after our wedding in May of 2013.  Mike and I got married on the last day of school back home in Hutchinson, Kansas.  We actually got married at school in the gymnasium in front of all the kids, teachers and staff of Lincoln Elementary, and a host of family and other friends.  The gym was packed and it was how we both wanted it to be.  As I look at Mike standing there in the background (sans chin whiskers then) while I said my good-bye to all of the kids as they were leaving, I have to imagine that he might have been wondering where the path of his life would now lead him.  

Just like me, little did he know.

                                   and life goes on, through everything