Mitch: Alright, Ed, your best day. What is it?

Ed: No. I don’t want to play.

Mitch: Come on! We did it.

Ed: I don’t feel like it.

Mitch: …Okay.

Ed: I’m 14 and my mother and father are fighting again. You know, because she caught him again. Caught him? This time the girl drove by the house to pick him up. And I finally realized he wasn’t just cheating on my mother, he was cheating on us. So, I told him…I said, “You’re bad to us. We don’t love you. I’ll take care of my mother and my sister. We don’t need you anymore.” And he made like he was gonna hit me, but I didn’t budge. He turned around and left and never bothered us again. I took care of my mother and my sister from that day on. That’s my best day.

Phil: Well…what was your worst day?

Ed: Same day.

-City Slickers

Alright, folks, there’s an important lesson I learned over the last few days that needs to be shared. Fair warning: You’re in for a rough ride.

First, I have to back up. *Cue cassette rewind sound*

Tuesday, October 25, 2016.

That day and the three days that followed were the worst days of my life. I never want to have another day like it and I never want to relive them.

The first part of that Tuesday had been like any other. In fact, when I got home from work, I was flying high. There was an event at school that I was in charge of and had been working on for weeks. Before I left school, I realized the majority of the organizing for it was done and the event was almost taking care of itself. I was psyched to feel so ahead because it meant that I didn’t have to worry about it too much before the big event on Friday and I could focus on another big event for the next following week.

I rushed home to tell my husband, who suggested we celebrate and go out to dinner. We chose to go to one of our favorite TexMex restaurants that was right near our apartment. At dinner, we sat outside because it was so beautiful out, and as we were finishing out meal, we caught a glorious sunset since we were sitting facing west.

We got home, and my husband still had some work to do, while I settled in to watch The Voice.

As the show ended, my husband came out of his office and said he needed to go meet with a client, he would be home late, and I shouldn’t wait up for him. He gave me a dry peck on the cheek, walked over to the front door of the apartment and left.

I must have fallen asleep, because I remember groggily waking up to Jimmy Fallon’s voice and the theme song of The Tonight Show. I promptly switched off the TV and started turning off lights before going into the bathroom to put on my PJs, wash my face, brush my teeth, and get in bed. I had just tied my hair into a ponytail when my phone rang.

Everything changed during that phone call.

My husband called to tell me he had been arrested. He wasn’t positive where they were taking him, I couldn’t see him, he didn’t know what to do, and they were only giving him a few minutes to let me know. Somewhere in there, he told me the charge of the arrest which I didn’t understand and promptly forgot, and then he told me that he loved me before the line went dead.

I remember feeling cold and looking at my face in the mirror and wondering if I was really dreaming. Things like this didn’t just happen.

I snapped out of it and quickly realized that I didn’t have time to think like that and that I needed to spring into action. I called my mom, my boss, a coworker when I couldn’t reach my boss, a close friend to pray for me, and some close couple friends of ours to pray for us. I called them in that order.

The coworker I called was an angel. She offered to come be with me or come over to her house and when I said I was going over to my parents’ house, she started listing off everything I needed to pack that she knew I wouldn’t be thinking about because I was so preoccupied. Looking back, it was one of the nicest parts of the night.

The next 29 hours were a blur of phone calls. I know I didn’t sleep. I know I got ahold of a friend who is a lawyer who got me in touch with the right kind of defense attorney my husband was going to need to get him out of jail and help him through the case once he was out. I got in touch with my in-laws, and a place that would help me bail him out of jail.

He was finally released somewhere around 3AM on Thursday, October 27, 2016. It already felt like an eternity, but it was only the beginning.

Later on that day, we had a meeting with the lawyer and he asked me to leave the room to talk to my husband alone. It felt strange to be treated so separately from him. I had gotten so used to every decision being made together and being treated as a couple instead of one person, it caught me off guard when he told me he wanted to talk to my husband alone. I got up, went down the short, carpeted hallway, and sat down in one of Kelly green pleather chairs in the small waiting room. Although I was far away from the room and the door was closed down the hall, I could hear some of what was being said.

That is when the attorney asked my husband the question that would change my world forever.

Have you always been faithful to your wife?

There was a short pause before I heard his answer.

No.

My mind instantly went blank.

My heart began to pound.

Angry tears streamed down my face as I sat there looking at my hands. I felt deceived. I felt ashamed. I felt mortified. But mostly, I wanted to run. I wanted to get up, grab my car keys and run, but I stayed glued to my seat and willed myself to stop crying so that my husband wouldn’t know anything was wrong when he came out.

I won’t go into every detail of the next 22 hours. It wasn’t pretty. But at the end of that 22 hours, on the morning of Friday, October 28, 2016, I was sitting on the couch of our apartment, and I calmly turned to my husband and asked for a divorce.

I really had no idea just how horrific that next 12-month period would be, but the following October 25, I remember staying off of social media. The realization that it had been a whole year and how much had happened was too much for me and I just couldn’t think about it.

This year came, and I stayed off of social media for the first part of the day. The day finally felt like a normal day to me.

Then I got home and logged onto Facebook.

Never in my life have I noticed a day when so many people have good memories of various October 25ths. Wedding anniversaries, the beginnings of relationships, children being born, honeymoons, adoption days, awards, and birthdays. Everyone was posting good memories from October 25 in past years. I even joined Facebook on October 25, 2005, and so Facebook had prepared a “Happy 13th Faceversary” video.

Why? Why that day? And why did that day have to be so horrific for me when it felt like the rest of the world got to celebrate it?

I angrily shut my computer and began to brood in self-pity. Lately, I’ve been working on turning bad moments into positive ones, but at that moment, I was not in the mood.

Why, God? Why me? Why did I have to be the one to marry the wrong person and have this horrible scar of a memory? As I sat there, I noticed that sitting next to my computer was my gratitude journal. I write in it twice a day and fill up an entire page by the time I go to bed.

I opened it to what I had written that morning, and there was one word that caught my attention at that moment: choice.

I took a beat to think about the word. Choice. I had a choice.

Was this going to be a good moment for me? Or would I continue having bad ones? All I knew is that I hated how I felt.

At that moment, I realized what really happened two years ago. On one hand, it was painful. As I already wrote, I never want to relive those days again. But it also gave me the life that I had today. I’m happier, I have more friends, I’m more open, and all of that grows and gets better every single day. How could I be mad at that?

Plus, those days reminded me just how much God loved me. He had pulled me out of something terrible and had given me a whole new life and a second chance at a lot of things I had been wishing for. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t devoid of goodness while others were prospering. I was in the midst of it just like everyone else. I had something to celebrate, and what’s more, even if I didn’t, I realized that it was proof that there was still good going on in the world during my worst moments. I could choose to look at that as unfair or as something to keep me going and keep living until I felt the goodness of the world again.

It was a huge epiphany for me. So here is my hope for you: take those bad moments and realize that right now, there is good going on in the world. Even though your moment might be dark, wonderful things are happening all around you, and you might have to wait to feel like your life is good again, but it will come. Just let the light in. Let go of the dark. Do whatever you have to do to let go of the dark.

Because when you let go, the pressure of your world turns the coal you’ve been holding into a diamond. Hold onto the diamond and don’t let it go.