The sucker punch...

It can come out of nowhere. You think all is well, everything's fine, nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong...you get kind of cocky about life even. You are so self-assured, so self-confident, so willing to accept the planets in their orbits, God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, so we want to think. Then something happens. Anything can happen to unsettle and uproot and disturb our quiet and predictable universe, the life we keep trying to make perfect, the totally special life we think we deserve, the good life, the American Dream, whatever kind of life we imagine to be without flaw or blemish. I like Scott Peck's book,The Road Less Traveled, for its opening line especially. "Life is difficult". He found as a counselor that there would be more people able to cope with life and not go crazy if they just accepted the fact that life is not nor ever will be what we want or expect or hope - it will be hard and we will be dealt curves and twists and convolutions like we never imagined. And what will we do about it? No, we don't have to live in a shell to avoid it. And no we don't have to just take it either. For me, life is a test of faith, of living for an unknown but benign future, of getting up after we fall, of praying and seeking answers and asking for divine as well as earthly help, not trying to make it alone - and not having so much pride that we either think we are above adversity or don't have to accept help to deal with it. We are here to serve and to be served - to learn and grow and understand that we are in a refining process that never ends, a journey of eternal progression that is fraught with pitfalls and stumbling blocks and joyful successes too. So when the sucker punch comes, and it will many times, we aren't so proud that we deny it and are humble enough to roll with it and come up fighting, not each other, but whatever adversarial influence is out there to maybe take us off our path briefly, that path we are trying to forge out of life's wilderness, that will show itself as we keep struggling....and oh yeah, our daughter Megan ran off to Idaho and got married the other night. But it's ok, it's a good thing. She's 37, divorced, needs a good man and we think she got one in James "Kimo" Tucker! Congrats you two. The Hawaiian reception comes in a few more weeks! And we refinanced yesterday and got a 5.375% rate instead of the 7.75% rate we've been living with for years. So see, persistence pays off and some adversity can be overcome in time. But it will always be there in one form or another...so don't try to avoid it or it will hit you like a sucker punch!