The air is cool as I begin my walk down my street. My chocolate lab, Hazel pulls me with urgency. The first part of the walk all I can focus on is holding onto Hazy. A squirrel here and a squirrel there.

On the way back, she settles into a slow pace and my mind begins to wander.

I think of my faith. How strongly I have always believed that everything happens for a reason. M whole life I was able to embrace this.

In divorce I was not. At least not initially. I have often wondered why I could not. Why I turned temporarily bitter for the first time in my life.

Tonight as Hazel finally tires of squirrel hunting – I realize why.

While I was growing up my family was my everything. When I got older they remained my everything. Then as we all built our own families we had a bigger, more wonderful everything.

My family is what made everything okay when the hard stuff of life happened. It was the constant and undeniable feeling of loving and being loved.

Somewhere along the way, I hadn’t realized that my husband had become my family. He was not just the boy I met in college, the young man I married while we tried to figure out life – he had become my family.

It was not something that I could understand. A family member no longer seeing my value. No longer being capable of the constant and undeniable feeling of loving and being loved.

So faith temporarily evaded me while bitterness snuck in.

Only my faith returned reminding me that I still had my family – that essential companion to faith. The ones who have always been everything and who have always gifted me the constant and undeniable feeling of loving and being loved.

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