Ten Years Ago Today we were on our honeymoon. If you would have interrupted our breakfast at Oceanside Meadows Inn in Prospect Harbor, Maine (where the hostess served edible wildflowers with her breakfast) to tell us our future we would have been shocked.
if you would have said “ All ten of your future children have already been born. Ten years ago tonight you will be at a little Italian Bistro in Mankato celebrating your anniversary. Your 19 year old soon to be Bethel University Junior will be taking care of your youngest son, who is already ten, while the other 8 children are in various locations.” we would have thought you were absolutely NUTS. We didn’t even know about older child adoption and would not have been able to imagine how we could acquire ten kids.
And tonight I wonder what where we will be ten years from now. All of the children we now have will have graduated from high school. How many of them will be still living with us? Will any of them be married? Will we be grandparents? How many of them will be in college or have graduated? Will there be some in prison? Will they all still be alive? Will we?
But this is the beauty of life. Because we may have run away from the future had we known it back then. And I’m grateful now that we don’t know the future, as we might be afraid to live it and thus miss out on so much of the good in order to skip the bad.
But as Deborah Hage often sings at the end of her seminars (which is the way the book I wrote ends):
And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end the way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance I could have missed the pain
but I’d of had to miss the dance.
if you would have said “ All ten of your future children have already been born. Ten years ago tonight you will be at a little Italian Bistro in Mankato celebrating your anniversary. Your 19 year old soon to be Bethel University Junior will be taking care of your youngest son, who is already ten, while the other 8 children are in various locations.” we would have thought you were absolutely NUTS. We didn’t even know about older child adoption and would not have been able to imagine how we could acquire ten kids.
And tonight I wonder what where we will be ten years from now. All of the children we now have will have graduated from high school. How many of them will be still living with us? Will any of them be married? Will we be grandparents? How many of them will be in college or have graduated? Will there be some in prison? Will they all still be alive? Will we?
But this is the beauty of life. Because we may have run away from the future had we known it back then. And I’m grateful now that we don’t know the future, as we might be afraid to live it and thus miss out on so much of the good in order to skip the bad.
But as Deborah Hage often sings at the end of her seminars (which is the way the book I wrote ends):
And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end the way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance I could have missed the pain
but I’d of had to miss the dance.
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