I am happy.The happiest I have been in ages. Our lives have taken shape again.

After a very turbulent year during which we lost a house, a business and felt our life shaken to the core in its most significant areas(our relationship with each other, our sense of belonging and security) we have finally found PEACE and CONTENTMENT.

We have learned many precious lessons through all the difficult months:

1. A bigger house doesn’t necessarily equal a happier wife/life. For me, a bigger house by the beach(everyone’s dream, right?) meant being away from friends, from work, from life!

2. When God takes away from you the things that made you feel secure(for my hubby, a prosperous business, for myself, my home) it’s not because He wants to punish you. It’s because He needs to remove the obstacles that prevent you from seeking Him and His ways.

3. Working with your hubby doesn’t work!!For me, anyway. I have learned that it’s better to face my our personal challenges ALONE because solving them gives me a sense of worth I would never achieve by having hubby “protecting” me from the big, bad world…

4. Changes bring along good things! We have made a lot of new friends and have reconnected with good old friends  in Thessaloniki. We are excited to have met so many quality people in such a short space of time and we truly hope these friendships will develop in time as Thessaloniki will be the place we’ll be returning to for holidays and short breaks. We have an apartment here now that we want to put to good use, at the end of the day!!

5. Agreement is most important when married! As you have probably gathered from my previous post, we are both quite strong headed and determined to have OUR own way. But stripped to the bare bone and left without the things that defined us as the selfish ME we have learned to listen more to each other and work towards a common goal.

6. Losing gives one the opportunity to rethink/restructure one’s life in order to achieve happiness. When we lost our home we were given the chance to explore options as we wouldn’t have done before. I knew hubby was missing his home land. He knew I wanted him to readjust his focus from business to family. We were trapped into a false sense of security and a rut, a fruitless busyness we needed to escape. And we did! Relocating to Greece for three months gave hubby the opportunity to realise he wants his home country to be a summer and not a permanent location for the moment. It gave us the chance to spend time in the presence of  dear friends for whom family comes first and who helped us put things into perspective and re-shift our focus. And it made us realise we want to work now that we are young in a country like Ireland, where conditions are favourable so that we can enjoy our old age in a country like Greece, where the sun is predominant :-).  Things have come together for us and I couldn’t be happier!

Life is better when surrounded by friends.