by PH1966

Created on: September 07, 2008

If there is one thing that helps me through all the crises I've had to deal with, it is the belief that the situation is temporary and that the adversity will pass. Without that hope, I'd have been finished years ago. If my circumstances help even one person, if I can give someone courage, then I won't feel like it's been in vain or that the cross can't be lifted.

Many times I have had reason to feel that all is lost. Various people in my family have passed away within a decade, I have never been successful in my personal life; financially, I'm flying by the seat of my pants. The most difficult of all my challenges to date has been raising my two children as a single parent, and seeing them experience their father's inability to show love. While I've had to watch the ill-health of others close to me, and not yet experienced it myself, I still have felt as though I'm plagued by misfortune and it's not my imagination that I've attracted the sympathy of many people in my inner circle.

My ex does everything his family tells him to do, even at the age of 50, and one of those things is to ignore the emotional needs of our children. Somewhere in his oxygen-starved brain, I'd like to think my ex loves our kids, but he's not acting like he does right now and they're feeling the loss. As if that wasn't hard enough, we've had other things to test our strength and patience to test us to the absolute limit.

A few months ago, a motor accident almost wiped out three members of my family when a negligent driver turned the corner as they were crossing a main road. My older brother already had problems with one of his legs, but this accident broke both of them. How do you deal with that? Also, I could have lost my elderly mother in this same accident, and without her quick thinking, I could have also lost my son.

There are plenty of things that keep me awake at night, wondering how we are going to pay for all our expenses, how I will raise my children so that they can become happy, independent, functional adults, and will I find any personal happiness myself? I know we can only tackle one problem at a time, but sometimes they come rushing through my mind like an express train, especially at night when I'm alone with my thoughts.

Despite all this chaos, I still hang on to the belief that things will get better. When something happens at school and my kids achieve something, when they have fun with their friends, when I do well in my work and university studies, and see my brother making progress with the recovery from his motor accident, I feel that God is with us and is helping us through our difficulties.

We need to work through each adversity, to see it through and emerge stronger on the other side. We were put on this earth to be tested, and each of these hurdles teaches us something we didn't know before. I can't tell you how many times I've almost lost hope, but still somewhere in my darkest hours, I feel a little voice coaching me along and giving me hope that everything I'm worried about will work out in the end.

I've had to be firm mentally with accepting this voice, not rejecting it. I don't just have my own life to consider, my children need a strong mother to help them through the rest of their childhood and future years of adolescence. As hard as it is to be mother and father, I think about the responsibility I have ahead of me, to be a step ahead and it prevents me wallowing too deeply into my own problems.

Sure, God gives us crosses to bear, but He also gives us shoulders to carry them with.

Learn more about this author, PH1966.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.