Life is not a Strategy Game

Growing up, I played a lot of board games with my sister, who was just 2 years older. The problem was, she is incredibly smart. So she always wanted to play strategy games--Stratego, chess, etc. To even my odds, I always preferred games of chance. My favorite was always Life. You remember, the game with the little car tokens full of pink and blue pegs to represent your family. You spin the wheel and... oh! You wrote a bestselling novel! Collect $150,000! But then next turn... oh! Your house burned down, pay $500,000!

Anyway, I was thinking of that game today, and how unpredictable my real life is now. Since we chose a military life, I think we expected a certain amount of surprises. (The "pegs" in our little car are adding up quickly, and we're about to add another blue one. :-) ) But deployments always heighten the sense of unpredictability. Spin the wheel one day and oh! the car is not working! Spin it again and discover you need to file some obscure paperwork somewhere, and of course they want your husband's signature. So far, so good for us here, but I find myself constantly wondering/worrying-- what problem is going to come up next? I know I CAN and will handle it, because I have to. I just wish I knew when something would go wrong and how hard it will be to fix it. But if I knew that, then I could strategize for it... and life is not really a strategy game is it? If it were, wouldn't that take out all the fun?