I read novels to unwind after my son is asleep at night. My job involves constant tension, and the strains of single motherhood weigh on my shoulders. But at least I try to find novels whose protagonists, preferably female, are struggling with spiritual issues or operating from spiritual principles. (There are more of them out there than one would think.)

And sometimes they give me deeper insights into the course I am walking, or put my situation into perspective, as I read how others before me have dealt with harsher hands than I have been forced to. I've only had to deal with a husband who left me eight years ago in January, when our son was only 18 months old. Eventually he reached the decision that he would never come back and proceeded to get a divorce and write a letter releasing me from the Blessing. That was in 1991, a critical year for me, as it turned out.

After months of secret expectation, I gave notice at The World & I, where I was an assistant senior editor, that I was going to leave to work at New Hope Academy, for $10,000 a year less but at a job I'd coveted: librarian of the small library I'd almost single-handedly created from scratch when the school opened and working in the office as well. I'd been reading Louise Hay and believed my dreams would be fulfilled if I had the right attitude toward life. It's not that simple, I found. Sometimes, as we walk the path of individual restoration, other factors intervene. Six months later I found myself, stunned, standing in line at the unemployment office. The only job I really wanted had been snatched away by the school board in the face of dropping enrollments. The dream was shattered.

I found employment, but my life was empty of meaning. In desperation, I kept telling myself that since I didn't really care about anything anymore, God was preparing me for a re-Blessing in 1992 that would focus my life on something meaningful and fulfilling again. It didn't happen, and I'm still recovering from the ramifications of that.

Was God, then, an uncaring parent who didn't see or care how much I was suffering? Was He just a distant Supreme Being? I didn't trust my intuitions anymore; after all, I had convinced myself that it was God's desire for me to go to the school and abandon a 25-year career as a journalist. I had convinced myself that my anomie could only mean I was being prepared to drop everything and follow a new husband to...wherever. So, what did it all mean? I've been struggling with those questions since August 1992, when I didn't go to Korea.

Getting back to reading novels, as I lay in bed reading last night, I had a flash of insight that had eluded me for two and a half years of anguish. I'd been angry and hurt because the God I'd talked myself into praying to, the Father who understood my needs and would take care of me as His daughter, hadn't come through for me. Suddenly I realized that this is the conventional concept of God, not the one True Parents have taught us to relate to.

That God is sorrowful and sometimes has to ask us to walk a painful course, to restore a historical situation or ancestral inheritance, or just to grow our own understanding of His heart. Sometimes He has to seem to turn away His face. In searching for answers, how small my mind had been!

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