I never planned

I have so much to celebrate & I am excited to bring this blog back from the dead! Dating a hunk, getting engaged and getting married sure sucks up your time. But I love this blog and I love talking real with the people in my life. I am excited to share with you my wedding (just got the pictures back!!) and all that is new in my life. But I've had something on my heart I want to share first. 
It's embarrassing for me to admit this, but I think there is something good in showing your weaknesses sometimes. 

I follow a really popular blog about a young wife with 5 children. Last year, she tragically lost her husband to cancer. The diagnosis was sudden and readers followed along as her husbands health slowly declined. I speak for probably every reader of her blog as I say, post after post was heartbreaking, watching their lives forever change through the posts of instagram. I weeped as I found out her sweet young husband had passed and left her a widow of 5 children. Within the course of a few years, her entire world was different. 

And my heart broke for her. 

A few months after her husband passed, she reconnected with a important person from her past & she was married to him. She continues to share her journey through indescribable pain and finding joy and love after heartache. 

Before I share my epic blunder, I start out with this. My thoughts were my own and I never shared with anyone how I felt. This woman doesn't know me and really, what does my opinion matter? 

But as I go throughout my life, I am trying to become like Christ. 

He didn't just not say a judgment, he didn't think one.
I am working on refining my heart and private accountability matters. 

Now, it's the next part of the story I am ashamed to admit. 

I placed judgement on her decision. I thought to myself, "How after only a few months she could move on?"

How she could bring a new person into those babies lives after such little time? 

She she wrote a post I'll never forget. It shook to me the core and changed my heart forever.
I looked for it for hours and I can't find it. Did I make this all up in my head? 

I don't remember everything, but what I remember reading said "I never planned on losing my husband..."

And that was it. I stopped all my other thoughts and thought about all the decisions I have made. I thought of all the things in my life I never intending on happening. All the tragedies that left me without words, without action.
Then I thought of all the tragedies I haven't been through. How many lives I HAVEN'T lived.
My thoughts were silenced.  

To look from the outside in, on a life that you are not living, and decide YOU know best. It's not right.
People don't need judgement. They need love. They don't need need your opinions. They need your empathy.

"Opinion is really the lowest form of knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. 

The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and to live in anothers' world." 

I think the world has way too many opinions right now.
So many people think they "know best" or they would've done better.
It's so easy to say what we "would have done" if we were in someone else's shoes.
The shoes of a woman who has lost her husband. The shoes of a African American man. The shoes of the president. The shoes of the homeless. The shoes of an addict.

But were not in their shoes.
We probably don't want to be.
And these people probably never planned, some never chose.
I really think at the end of the day, we are all just doing the best we know how to do. 

We need more love. We need more compassion. We need more generosity in our thoughts toward other people. We need stop thinking that we know the whole story, when we only know a sliver.
Because Jesus didn't need ask us to go around giving our opinions. He just asked us to love people.

"We make loving people a lot more complicated than Jesus did." 

I'm going to do better because I think that is what will make a difference in this world.
Thanks for loving me through it all. 

Xo Kelsie Buhl