Like every other young girl,
Catherine dreamed of falling in love with a man who would love her back. She dreamed of a beautiful wedding - maybe outdoors - and of having beautiful children, a lovely yet humble home, and of having a career that would allow her to use whatever gifts and skills she was given at birth.
Instead, what she experienced was abandonment, rejection, illness, failure, weakness, rape, kidnapping, crime, deception, accusation, betrayal, hate, lies, infidelity, loneliness, theft, manipulation, degradation, and incomparable loss. She did have children, but the fathers did not celebrate the births. She alone reveled each time the little miracles grew within her, and she alone celebrated each new life. Marriage was both a disastrous grand illusion and delusion punctuated by total loss.
She did not know who she was or whether her life had any value at all. As a young woman in need of a father, she did not know anything about him. He had disappeared mysteriously only to be seen for one short moment in time twenty-six years later. For most of her life, she did not know that she was the granddaughter of an industrialist and philanthropist.
The desires of her young heart were long gone... desires for music, dance, and college. Her dream of a happy marriage dissipated in a vacuum of inadequate and negligent single parenting, and lost hope.
What does a woman do with a shattered life? When all she is left with are questions, and memories like broken shards of glass? She lost her way. She felt like a wanderer in a jungle with no path to follow. In this tangled jungle that was her life, she felt like a tree without roots. She reached for something more, but that was as obscure as her sense of purpose. With a bruised heart and no clear direction, she plowed ahead in search of absolute truth and light. She needed to answer the questions of how and what? How was she supposed to live and what was the purpose of life?
This was her life, and this was how, through faith and with God's perspective, she began to understand life. With her new found faith and perspective, she began to piece her own life together.