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This morning I spoke with an old friend who is struggling through some hard times.  Her husband is looking for a new job and even though financially they are doing fine, she hates being in a state of limbo.  She's a planner (sound familiar?) and it's really difficult not knowing what chapter comes next in her life. 

And I totally understand that.  Hello the last four years of our lives!

Although the more I think about it, above all else, I am grateful for the hard times.

Five years ago, my husband's elderly father died suddenly.  Sure, he was in his eighties, but it was still unexpected since he had been healthy, relatively-speaking.  At the time, Dave had just taken the bar exam and we were living in central California and we were terribly unhappy with our circumstances.  Real estate was unaffordable, sure, but it didn't even matter in the face of the mountain of debt we had just run up while Dave was attending law school.  We basically already had a "mortgage" only we had nothing but a dinky apartment to show for it and virtually no prospects for improvement.

Dave's father wasn't a wealthy man by any means, but he owned his home and that divided by his six children would've been enough to really change our starting-off point in life.

But his father left almost everything he owned to his oldest son.  The rest of the siblings, Dave included, were for the most part left out of his estate.  It was a shock to all of us.  It had just never occurred to us that the estate wouldn't be evenly divided. 

We were understandably baffled. 

But here's where I go back to the point of all of this.  In hindsight, which is usually all we've got to go on, I am 100% grateful that we were basically disinherited by David's father.  Not because it forced us to make our own way (we were already extremely hard working), but because it forced us down a different path.  If we had inherited that money, we would have paid off our debt, sure, but we also would have stayed in California.  We would still both be working at stressful jobs and we would probably have scrounged and saved and gotten into a house, which given our resources vs. the cost of real estate in California, would probably be a dump.  I'm guessing we would have been doing a lot of complaining about our circumstances.

Instead, we went to Plan B.  And even though Plan B has not been easy and we've had to make tough choices and difficult moves, PLAN B IS SO MUCH BETTER.  I'm so grateful to be where we are now and not where we would have been.  It just reminds me to stay optimistic.  Just because things are bad in a moment, like they are for my friend right now, that doesn't mean they won't get better.  Sometimes even the most bitter lemons can make some fantastic lemonade.