God making our marriage beautiful
4 One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.
5 On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.
6 They shall speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness.
7 They shall pour forth the fame of your rabundant goodness and shall sing aloud of your righteousness.
Yesterday, I posted an album on Facebook. I did it for my husband. One of the themes over 29 years of marriage (yes, we were young. No, children, we don’t recommend dating for a few months and getting engaged, married only a year after you met:),)…
As I was saying…the theme, publicly declaring celebration – my husband loves to do this; I feel awkward, not wanting anyone to think we’re bragging or to make anyone feel bad. (Extrovert, introvert…half full, half empty…yes, 29 years of merging two very different fleshes.)
So, as an act of humble repentance, I shared these photos, declaring my gratitude to him, and even more, to the Lord our God, for the marvels of our marriage.
Since we’re at that point that some people ask us, “How have you done it?” and I never know the answer, except God has done it, I realized that there have been two key components to growth in our marriage:
- Celebrating the glorious moments. There are pictures in our album that represent pure, sweet shalom – hikes in the woods – both before children and after; long days spent windsurfing and the conversations of falling and flying afterwards; cold, windy spring vacations when my husband dug a hole on the beach so I could take a little sun home…
- Celebrating the awful moments. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean we’ve pretended disastrous moments were lovely. There are words we both wish we could have back – but we can’t. The days when one or the other of us would have easily traded the other in for an imagined life of ease on the proverbial, greener side of the fence. There are some memories so ugly they will never look pretty, but they may look hopeful – in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even in the worst moments of our marriage, we marvel, knowing that if it weren’t for God’s steadfast love working in and through us, something beautiful, something holy, something created to bring God glory, would have been destroyed.
Sorry folks. I removed the photos from Facebook. I could only stand the glory for so long. I’m going to put them in an album, along with some of the stories, and give them to my husband (one of the things we agree on is that we can celebrate these important occasions on any day that suits us and gifts can be ongoingJ).
I’ll leave you with the story of the one photo I left, captured in New Orleans, the year I was pregnant with our fourth child. I love it – we look young, fresh, happy, and we were. The hidden story, the struggle part of it, that you don’t know, is that I have always struggled to show this kind of affection – hugs, pats, putting my arms around my husband. So while you might see, “happy beautiful couple in perfect harmony,” I see, “God doing something impossible and creating beauty out of pain.” God is making all things new, and we have the marriage to prove it.
