Sheri Dew: Living the unexpected life

Friends say it took her a couple of years to recover. In one fell swoop, she lost her best friend, roommate and boyfriend. Suddenly, she was coming home to an empty apartment and her best friend was off on her honeymoon. To make matters worse, she bumped into the man regularly because of her work.

"I've got to tell you, I think it was supposed to happen," she says. "I can't feel anything but grateful for that episode in my life. I think the Lord had to hit me in the back of the head to get me to dig deeper than I had ever dug before. It turned me to scriptures and prayer and fasting and the temple in a different way. I had no idea it was possible to feel so much loneliness and rejection.

"It changed forever, in the most wonderful way, my feelings about the Savior. I tapped into power that's greater than anything in this life. So it changed my life. I am sure I wouldn't have been prepared for my current church assignment without that experience."

Typical of Dew, she examined the experience and took from it every lesson she could find. One of them is genuine empathy for others.

"I haven't been divorced," she says. "I haven't lost my husband. But I have felt acute loss. I have felt pain. I have felt loneliness. And so when something happens to someone else that causes those emotions, I understand. Pain is pain." And here she pauses as her eyes well up with tears.

She also knows how to forgive. Do you know why Dew has back pain? Or why it's difficult for her just to stand at the pulpit? According to friends, when her former roommate was pregnant, Dew visited her at the hospital and took her outside in a wheelchair for fresh air. She injured several discs in her back while pushing the wheelchair up and down hills around the hospital.

In the end, as she recovered from the emotional trauma, Dew came to grips with her lot in life. She made her peace with being a single woman. "For my own sanity," she says, "I had to get to the point where I was willing and able to say to the Lord, 'Thy will be done,' and to really mean it. If you worry about it constantly, it wrecks your life. It's an ever-present issue, but I'm not distraught about it. I feel very confident I will get married in this life. But it doesn't look like I'll have children, because of my age."

Instead, she dotes on her nephews and nieces, taking them on trips to New York or to her cabin in Midway. They are, to an extent, her family. She is grateful they have allowed her to be part of their lives.