By Cosette Snarr
I married the man of my dreams. He was good looking, kind, had a great sense of humor and loved to help around the house. As we gradually added four children to the mix my joy increased. We worked together at handling the normal struggles of raising kids and making ends meet. My life was good. Then things took a drastic change.
For some unknown reason my husband started having seizures. Seizures are terrifying to witness, but the effects of them are even worse. Between the medications and whatever was happening to his brain his personality started to change. My husband became a zombie, no longer interacting with our children or me. He was unable to hold down a job. He didn’t participate in any decision making regarding our family and to make matters worse, he didn’t recognize the impact his condition had on our family.
At first I took on the responsibility of “fixing” the situation. I was a strong woman—I’d done hard things before—but over time I learned this wasn’t something that could simply be fixed. I became angry and resentful not only toward my husband, but toward God, feeling like I was being punished and I didn’t know why. I’d had such a wonderful life—why did it have to turn so sour. I’d felt I’d been the victim of a huge bait and switch scam.
For years I wallowed in self-pity, resentful of this terrible situation. What had I ever done to deserve such punishment? I believed everything that happens to us has a purpose, but for the life of me I could not see one good thing that came as a result of my husband’s episodes. I pled for years for God to take the challenge from me, but those prayers seemed to stop at the ceiling.
Fast forward to today. I now recognize those difficult years as the greatest blessing in the world. That realization only came when I stopped insisting the only way to describe my life was bad because it didn’t fit my picture of what a good life was. After all, how could uncontrolled seizures be anything but bad?
Now I know God was allowing my husband’s disability to teach me to learn how to trust Him. Things had been so perfect for me when I got married, if my husband hadn’t been figuratively been taken out of the picture, I would have never learned how to turn to God and trust that He not only loved me, but wanted the very best for me. I had to be willing change my perspective in order to gain that knowledge.
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