When I spoke to the senior girls' religion class this week I admitted to them that I didn't have a single boyfriend in high school. Or college. John and I started to fall in love during the last half of the last term of my senior year, and then I took a job in Chicago.

My hope was that any girls who felt left out of the dating scene would consider that there might be a wonderful relationship around the corner. Or a few corners. 

A friend was telling me about her daughter, who had two surgeries last year which kept her out of her favorite sport in her final year of college. At the time she felt like the world had caved in, and there was no getting back what she had lost. But recently she told her mother that she believed providence had a hand in those events. Last year the team did very poorly. But this year, as a grad student she was allowed to play and the girls were like a well oiled machine. They had fun, worked hard, laughed a lot and won games. Most of them. Things ended well after all.

There is a saying that if you want a happy ending it depends on where you stop the story. 

Once I read a novel about a man whose son had autism, and had bolted into the street as a little boy and been killed. The father was wracked with guilt, and spent most of his life under the shadow of regret.

Then he died too. He was walking by a lake with an angel guide when he met a young man and his bride. He looked familiar somehow. 

"Hi, Dad." The father was overcome. Here was his son, in heaven, happy and married to a lovely woman. The realization cracked open his pain. 

"You don't need to feel badly, Dad. God was taking care of me all along."

The son's name was Ben. 

If you believe, as I do, that death is not the end of the story, there is a lot of happiness waiting for us.