Waiting for Divine Intervention...Again

When I talk about my MS, I tell people that the diagnosis may have saved my life, and that it brought me and my husband together. Both of those things sound kind of odd, but bear with me. I first started having MS-related symptoms in August 2002. I was on active duty in the Air Force, and was about to start graduate school full time at the University of South Florida as part of a special program. I lost vision in my right eye due to something called optic neuritis, and while my vision came back, it was the start of what would become a 2 ½ year-long process to get diagnosed.

Over the course of that time, I had new symptoms crop up every several months or so, but my MRIs kept coming back clean--meaning they didn't show any lesions on my brain or spinal cord--which prevented an official diagnosis. So, in the fall of 2005, right before I was due to get married, I was scheduled to deploy to Kirkuk, Iraq about three weeks after my honeymoon. I was crushed, but I knew it was coming and it was my turn to fulfill my military obligations.

Then about a week before I was due to deploy, my first MRI results showing spinal lesions came back. The good news was that I was put on medical profile and could no longer deploy. The bad news was that a definitive diagnosis of MS was probably on the horizon. That obviously did happen, in January 2005, and I was medically retired from the Air Force six months later. At the time, my new husband and I had been living apart for about a year and a half, so while I was devastated at having to leave the Air Force, I was thrilled about getting to finally live with my husband under the same roof. Had this not happened, I still owed the Air Force time for paying for my master's degree, and given that we both would have been active duty officers, who knows how frequently we would be stationed together or be forced to live apart?

I like to think that getting MS was a sort of involuntary deal I made with God to be with my husband and put me on the track to my life where it is now--a pretty amazing place. It was the price I had to pay, and while it seems strange to think of it that way, it's a price I'd gladly pay all over again. Who knows where I would be now; would my husband and I still be married? Would we have had our two amazing children? I probably would never have been in a position to become a subject matter expert on Mexico's drug war or a published author. This, along with some other things that have happened in my life, demonstrates to me that on occasion, God does intervene in people's lives to set them on the path they're supposed to be on. Of course I didn't know where that path would go at the time.

I'm Catholic and not a particularly religious devotee, but I have a decent measure of faith. Being an analyst who scrutinizes and questions a lot of things is sometimes hard to reconcile with religion, which requires you to believe in things you can't see and in writings you can't always historically analyze or prove. While I've had my moments of doubt and certainly many questions, I've also seen too many things to not believe there is something out there greater than ourselves.

So now I find myself--to be accurate, my husband and I find ourselves--in a position to need some divine intervention again. We're at one of those intersections in life where we're having some difficulty deciding which way to go. More or less two options are available to us, and both have their pros and cons. We're also REALLY lucky that we'll be fine financially whichever way we go; I guess we just want to pick the path that will leave us with the least regrets. But some days I find myself strongly leaning in one direction, just to sway in the other the next day. I'm not naïve enough to think
that a sign from above will manifest itself in some incredibly obvious way, but nevertheless I find myself looking for signs every day. Does the beauty of the sunrise over the Rincon mountains (see the only slightly enhanced picture) and my emotional response to that every morning mean we're destined to live here in Tucson? Or does my husband's continued professional success mean a full military career is our path? I just don't know, and as an analyst and a control freak, I hate not knowing.

And this is where the whole "faith" thing comes in. I've experienced what I believe is divine intervention in my life on at least three separate occasions; I have no reason to believe that God's response to our arrival at these crossroads will be any different. I'm apprehensive that the benefits of the choice we'll end up making won't be immediately apparent; I'm not a patient person, and I know that the real reason for things happening the way they do often doesn't make itself apparent for years down the road. So, my husband and I will do what we've always done--make things happen that we have some measure of control over, and everything else we have to have faith that divine intervention will once more put us on the path where we're supposed to be.