Something New

  When I got married ten years ago, I really thought I was taking my vows seriously.   My (then) new husband and I thought we had all the ingredients for a strong marriage, like you’d find them on a checklist or something.

• A budding romance. Check.
• Common goals. Check.
• Shared interests. Check.
• A (sort of) faith in Christ. Check.

  Naturally, making a promise to stand committed to one another for the rest of our God-ordained lives seemed pretty easy! After all, we had no reason to think that we’d deal with the issues that other married couples deal with.   Yes, that is ominous foreshadowing there.   Our wedding day was storybook, full of young wedded bliss. But truth be told, that piece of wedding cake we saved in our freezer lasted a whole lot longer than that blissful feeling.   And let me tell you, that sucker didn’t make it to the one-year anniversary.   There have been many times when we have looked at each other and no longer recognized the person staring back at us. Times when “for better or for worse” seemed like just words. But during that time I’ve realized, what matters is not how serious you are about your vows on your wedding day…   …it’s about how serious you are every day after that.   When I got married, no one ever told me that for “his better” might just mean for “my worse.” That honoring my husband would be downright unthinkable at times. But the other thing that no one told me:   Grace makes a way.   Grace has sustained me in brokenness. Grace has healed me in weakness. Grace has made a path to reconciliation when I didn’t have the faith to believe there was one.   And grace has turned sorrow into joy once more. This year, as my husband and I renew our vows for the first time in ten years, we kind of feel like we’re saying them for the first time. In our first set of vows, we had more or less committed to stay together. This time around, we feel like we’re actually committing to being together, fully enveloped in God’s grace.   My prayer is for those of you in need of a real experience with God’s grace, whether married, single, divorced, or widowed. God is performing a great work in you and with time, you will see it too.