By Denise Wallace

The Law of Polarity states that everything has an opposite. For every bad situation, there is something of equal or greater good or benefit on its way.

About seven years into our marriage, my husband started feeling like there was more we were meant to do with our lives. We were comfortable—we had a nice home and things were moving along—but it all felt a little too easy, like we were just floating.

Only a week or two after sharing that feeling with me, he got word that his job was being dissolved. He had about two weeks to find something new.

I panicked. I really don’t like the unknown. But I told myself I could pick up extra shifts at the hospital if we needed the income. Thankfully, my husband is incredibly resourceful. Within a week, he had landed another job—but it meant relocating to a new state. And to make up for the temporary loss of income, I had to begin working full-time.

We packed up our life and moved into a small trailer with two of our children for four months while we figured everything out. But the hardest part? My oldest son—who was thirteen at the time—chose to stay in Utah with his dad rather than move with us. That broke me in ways I can’t fully explain.

Living in Las Vegas was difficult—especially for me. I didn’t understand why our life had to change so drastically, and why it felt like everything was getting worse. I worked as an ICU nurse, and the intensity of that job in Vegas was unlike anything I’d experienced. Sometimes I’d go three or four days straight without seeing my family, simply because of the hours I was working.

I was angry. I was depressed. It felt like we weren’t living—we were just surviving.

After two exhausting years, we found out my husband’s unit was going to deploy for a year. I was already stretched thin, and the idea of doing it alone was more than I could bear. We began making plans for me to move back to Utah and live with my mom so she could help with the boys during the deployment.

For seven years, my husband had faithfully applied to join the Army full-time, always getting passed up. But just before his deployment, he got the call: he’d been accepted. Not only that, but we’d be moving to North Carolina within the month.

He didn’t deploy.
I got to quit my job.
Everything changed.

Those two years in Las Vegas were incredibly hard. But just like the Law of Polarity promises, with the hard came blessings of equal or greater measure. The experiences we gained and the lessons we learned during that time shaped us. They strengthened us. And they prepared us for so many things we couldn’t have foreseen.

At the time, I couldn’t understand the why. All I knew was that life felt unbearably hard. But I kept going. And now, I feel so blessed to be home raising my children. We've even had the chance to live in incredible places like New York and Hawaii—something I never would have imagined during those hard Vegas years.

I’ve learned to be grateful for the difficult times.
Because now I know: the upswing always comes.
And every hard season holds something good—every single time.

The quicker I remember that, the easier it is to face the storms.

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