Two Year Wedding Anniversary
I am a little over a week behind on posting about our anniversary, but being prompt isn't one of my New Year's Resolutions so please bear with me!
These two pictures are 6 months apart.
I was in one of my best friend’s wedding in June of 2018 and I was so excited that the next wedding we were going to go to in our church was going to be ours!! In those 6 months, a lot of things changed and a lot of things remained the same.
I want to talk about my sweet husband and our marriage. I have always said that my love language is acts of service. This basically means I feel the most loved when someone does something for me that makes me feel appreciated or that helps make my life easier.
When Scotty and I first started dating (or maybe we weren’t quite dating yet), I was the lifeguard at our church’s summer day camp. One of my responsibilities as the lifeguard was to go in every Saturday and clean the pool and locker rooms so that they would be good to go for the next week of campers. Every Saturday Scotty would meet me out at the camp and clean the boys’ locker room for me. It’s hard for me to describe how big of a deal this actually was because I can’t begin to explain how disgusting this locker room was. It smelled like muddy/sweaty little boy and there would always be rolls of wet toilet paper covered in mud on the ground that needed shoveling before the whole room needed to be sprayed with bleach. I never asked Scotty to do those things. He would just ask what time I was planning on getting to the pool and he would just show up.
These days I need a lot of help. There is less wet toilet paper to shovel, but he still always shows up.
Here is a little video of Scotty transferring me to a chair so that I can get my hair washed at the salon!!
Before Scotty and I got engaged, we read The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller. There is one chapter entitled “Loving the Stranger” where Keller quotes Stanley Hauerwas:
“We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is . . . learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”
I certainly am not the same person that Scotty proposed to and Scotty is not the same 21 year old boy who got down on one knee. Our priorities have shifted. Our way of thinking and planning continues to evolve. We are both far far far from perfect. We bicker and argue and even yell, but at the end of the day I still need Scotty to help me complete tasks. He can’t decide to storm off because he’s made a commitment to be by my side no matter how difficult things get. Imagine being so unbelievably frustrated with your significant other because you aren’t seeing eye to eye on something that really doesn’t matter, but you still have to carefully pick them up and place them into bed each night. We still have to work as a team even when we’d rather be independent at a particular moment. There are times when Scotty has stopped mid argument to ask if I need more toothpaste on my toothbrush. Marriage is hard and you can find yourself married to a completely different person than the one that was at the wedding. Scotty and I grew up fast. We changed fast. But we are committed to each other. We are committed to our vows. And we are committed to loving and caring for the stranger that we might be married to.
Before my accident, we told our pastor that we wanted him to preach on the wise man building his house on the rock at our wedding. If you are unfamiliar with this parable, Jesus talks about two men who are building houses. The wise man takes the time and effort to build his house on the rock, which is a firm and solid foundation, while the foolish man builds his house on the sand. After both houses were complete, a big storm came; however, the house that was built on the sand was not able to withstand the wind and the rain.
Scotty and I knew that there would be storms in our life. We didn’t know when or how or what those storms were going to be, but we wanted to be sure that we were building our lives on Jesus so that we would be able to endure life's storms. During our wedding, our pastor said,
“So we live in a fallen world and are greeted by the unexpected and unanticipated and even the unwanted. And we have an image or a dream or a vision of the way that life will be, what it will look like, what the path ahead will be. We have this ideal of the future and then in an instant everything can change - and the future then looks very different and there are special challenges. And yet as circumstances change basic commitments remain the same.
A Christian marriage is a commitment to the will of God, whatever that may be - it’s a commitment to life together. And we have every hope of success and happiness because as believers we are building this life together on the rock.”
If you haven’t seen our wedding video here is a link to it on Facebook. I hope that the link works.
Happy anniversary to my love! I love the life we are building together!
-C.
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