A prayer for when life doesn't turn out the way you expect by Wendy Van Dyke.

Stop pushing me away insisting that I stop following you.

Wherever you go, I will go.

Wherever you live, I will live.

Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will also die and be buried there near you.

May the Eternal One punish me, and even more so, if anything besides death comes between us.

Ruth 116 through 17.

My life hasn't turned out the way I expected. I wouldn't change my life, but I'm not living the life I imagined when I was younger. I wonder how many of you feel the same way. By 34 I expected I'd have a career and

that I'd be a mom to a bunch of kids. Instead, I've just started a new job. I'm still

trying to figure out what I love to do and my husband and I don't even know if we want to have children.

There's things I never expected to have lived through by now too. I never thought I would hold my husband's hand through 18 sessions of chemo

or have spent a month leaving him in isolation ward in a hospital and

wondering if he'd be alive the next morning.

In the darkest times there were moments when I never thought he'd call himself a cancer survivor.

Then there are silly things I expected to have figured out. I thought I'd be able to clean an oven without googling it or know how to roast potatoes without

calling my mother for instructions.

What did you expect from life?

Did you think you'd go to college or buy a house or did you dream of traveling?

Did you expect to be healthy to bounce babies in your arms and call your mother

for advice?

Did you expect to be married by now or did you think you'd never settle down and now you have a

husband two kids and a dog? A Bible story with an unexpected ending. There's a story in the Bible about a woman called Ruth

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