From Riches to Rags, and the Glory I Found There

Hello Charles, My name is Katharine...you don't actually know me, but you were involved in a car accident with my husband, John, a year ago.  You chose to take cocaine and fentanyl and chose to drive, heavily impaired, on a revoked license.  Because of those decisions, you drove, head-on, into my husband while he was riding his motorcycle home from church…and you killed him. My amazing, full of life, kind-hearted husband...died brutally on some meaningless strip of road that will forever be imprinted on my mind. Your choices destroyed my whole world... You may wake up every single day in a jail cell but you are not the only one left to face horrific consequences of the choices you made that day. Every single day I wake up and face a life without the greatest man I ever knew. Every day I wake up and I must make the conscious choice to find joy in life still. Because your choices broke me...and I have to live life every day without my partner. Not to mention the grief of countle...

One of my best friends sent me this song today and said "This is you"...I  listened to it and I wept...                                                                    Build a Boat - Colton Dixon I will build a boat in the sand where they say it never rains And I will stand up in faith, I'll do anything it takes With Your wind in my sails, Your love never fails or fades I'll build a boat in the desert place So let it rain... Guys, I haven't had lyrics hit my heart so hard in a very long time. I texted my friend back and said "I'll build a boat in the desert place...that filled my whole soul". Because that is what I am doing here. I'm just trying to build the boat that the Lord has called me to build in this barren desert place that I am in. And. It. Is. Hard. Because it doesn't always make sense, this life that ...

  I am often surprised when the sharpness of grief hits me. It seems to come out of nowhere. Life happens and something prods at the gaping wound that John left behind...the one that I have been slowly stitching back together, inch by inch, since he was ripped from my life. Life reminds me that I was once a part of something so much bigger than myself...but I am not anymore...and that hurts. We had woven our lives together, two became one, for so very long, and then he died. Suddenly I was faced with the daunting task of figuring out how to somehow be half of who I was and a whole new person all at once. Neither of which I ever wanted to be. It was terrifying to become someone new, all by myself. The first thing I had to do without John was simply survive...and then I had to change everything about who I was and how I lived my life. I had to lay aside "our" dreams and "our" hopes and "our" life and come up with new ones...and it has been so much harder tha...