Dancing in the Minefields

Today would be 15 years of marriage. 15 years since we said I do.

I've had this song in my head by Andrew Peterson since I woke up this morning:

Well "I do" are the two most famous last words The beginning of the end But to lose your life for another, I've heard Is a good place to begin

'Cause the only way to find your life Is to lay your own life down And I believe it's an easy price For the life that we have found

And we're dancing in the minefields We're sailing in the storms This is harder than we dreamed But I believe that's what the promise is for

It really was harder than we dreamed. We could've never imagined all that lay ahead of us on that beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon when we stood before friends and family and said I do.

The struggle seemed to be behind us. G had already had his cardiac arrests. He had a life-saving device in his chest. Surely the doctors were right and it would be more of a nuisance and a concern than I path that would take us to the end of ourselves and to the end of G's life.

No, we never could've imagine those things on that day. We thought we were off on an adventure - but the kind we wanted. Marriage, missions work. Okay so maybe we couldn't go overseas longterm with his health but certainly it wasn't going to make a big impact. We would be like the people who came before us - young, excited, full of energy and life. Young marrieds who had all the time and attention needed to pour into college students.

Our first months were relatively easy really. Sure, I broke down one day emotionally because so much was changing and I couldn't figure out who I was anymore. I had gone from being an RA, TA, college student to a wife living in an apartment with her husband and working at a restaurant and riding my horse less. It felt crushing that day but I remember G holding me and us making plans for me to ride my horse more often. Again, it was all going to be okay.

And there was NST - a pressure cooker that brought out all our differences and brought so much strain on our young marriage. We would walk down the beach, far from the other couples and listening ears and thin walls of the El Caribe, and argue - loudly. Okay, we'd fight. It felt like the end of the world. We decided we needed to see a counselor when we got home but as we drove north in February, the stress melted away and so do the tension between us. Everything was going to be okay.

No, we couldn't have imagined what our vows would require of us. What it really means to hold each other's hand in life when that life includes sickness and health, richer and poorer, better and worse, death doing us part.

We got to the end of ourselves. We grew in ways we never could've imagined. We learned that each of us is weak and finite and that we make terrible gods. We learned to lean on Jesus as the one who will never let us down - not each other. We learned and we grew. We fought and we held on. We pushed each other to get help when we needed it but were too weary to reach out. We grew apart and we grew back together. We saw the best in each other - and very often the worst too. We learned what it means to love unconditionally - and how very conditionally we tended to love. We learned to rely on Jesus. We learned to forgive. We learned patience. We learned endurance. We learned to dance even in the minefields. No, we never knew when the next thing would hit us. But we learned to laugh, to love, to savor, to dream, to persevere, to keep going, even when we were sure to be hit with another unexpected explosion of difficulty - a trial, a loss, a fear-come-true.

It was hard. It was beautiful. And it is what those promises are for. No one can imagine what lies ahead. We make promises beforehand. We make a covenant before God and others. We ask them to help us keep it. We will need help. We "make plans in times of strength" as Greg would say, because those times of weakness prove them to be necessary.

I miss G. I miss the good times. Sometimes

I miss the struggle too. Not today. The struggle was really, really - lets throw in another one - really - hard. But boy did we do it.

I'm proud of us.

Happy (would be) 15th Anniversary Shnook <3