What is a Life Unimagined?

I’m pretty sure that everyone has lived a life they never imagined. Very few people set out to create their life in a specific way and have it unfold exactly as planned. I know my life didn’t!

I planned to be a loving wife, mother and daughter. My dream, fed by Christian romance novels and TV culture saturated with happy endings, was the little house with the white picket fence, children playing in the yard, sunshine and flowers growing…

You get the picture

But that didn’t happen. My rock star husband has battled clinical depression his entire life. We were married in 1981 and it wasn’t diagnosed until 2003. 22 years of living with the behaviors that come from severe clinical depression.

My dreams were shattered entirely in 1987 when I discovered that he had made some disastrous decisions that didn’t include my input. It led us to lose a house, bankruptcy, ill will with family and a mental image of me visiting him in a padded room. It caused me to lash out at God with the mantra, “I didn’t sign up for this!”.

But it turns out, I did…

God, in his love and mercy, helped to restore our lives. Bruce received partial help while I started to piece together the wreckage that was our marriage. It wasn’t easy and I never imagined having to face it, but I did and am so grateful for the way that God intervened. Through this process, he changed me in ways that again, I never imagined.

Our lives were uprooted numerous times because of depression, it caused an inability to cope with the stresses of corporate work and family dynamics. Depression took us from Oregon, to California, then to Arizona and ultimately, Illinois. When we finally landed here circumstances conspired together to bring about a complete diagnosis and treatment.

In 2017, we felt a call to relocate to the city of Chicago from the comforts of suburbia, so that we could serve in a church that we’d been placed in.

This is when my life began to experience the unimaginable benefits of total surrender.

We grew to embrace people of different races, ethnicities, various kinds of brokenness and life experiences. Our lives and all the bits collected through the years became nuggets of wisdom for others to build on. And we experienced some enormous personal growth and epiphanies at the same time. We found that being fruitful in ministry was more fulfilling and brought us more joy than anything we had ever experienced before.

This, for me, is an unimagined life

It may never be a life filled with stuff, ease, comfort or all the things that make up the American Dream. But there is no doubt it’s a more fulfilling life than any of those things can bring. And the eternal consequences are more far reaching than any of the temporal things that the known world can offer.

I hope you’ll sign up to receive my posts in your email. I promise not to try and sell you anything or fill your mailbox with endless writings. I’m inconsistent at best! I hope they inspire you to also live an unimagined life. And that you’ll share your own thoughts in the comments section so we can compare and learn from each other.

Blessings,

Cinda

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