You may have guessed this already, but today is our 10th wedding anniversary. And before we go any farther, please be warned that I am writing this post in advance–since our anniversary is just a week after our baby’s due date–so I’m currently in the middle of a surge of late-pregnancy hormones.
As I am 30 years old, this means that I’ve now spent 1/3 of my life married. Wow. If you want to pursue the marriage math further, it means that at age 40 I’ll have been married for half my life and after that, Lord willing, I’ll have spent more time married than not.
Marriage has been good to us, but it definitely hasn’t been easy all the time. When you only court for a few months, then have a two-month engagement, and then get pregnant six months after the wedding–and you do all this while still in college, if you’re me–you end up spending a lot of the early years of your marriage not only adjusting to married life but also adjusting to adult life in general. Like having your own place, paying bills, planning for the future, doing all your own housework, and of course, raising your own children. Luckily for me, Tim was (and always will be, as I like to remind him) older than me; had graduated from college several years earlier; and had a stable job when we married; otherwise, I am not sure how we would have managed!
As I look back on ten years, I see so much to be thankful for. First of all, obviously, I am thankful that the Lord brought Tim and I together. I am also thankful for the many godly women mentors in my life, some who have come and gone, but all who have had an influence on me as I have grown and learned what it means to be a wife and mother. I am thankful for the friends we’ve made, and that as we have moved around in ministry, that the Lord has always provided good friendships for myself and our children. I’m thankful that as time went on, Tim and I found out that we generally agree on how to raise our children–something we didn’t really discuss before getting married. It is a true blessing to be of one mind with your spouse on how many children to have, when to have them, how to discipline them, and how to raise them.
Before we married, Tim told me that love is a choice. At the time, I thought that was crazy. Love is about feelings, right? But he was absolutely right. Human feelings can be affected by so many things–the weather, how the kids are behaving on a given day, the availability of chocolate in my pantry, the time of the month, even what Tim did in my dream the night before (ha). But love is a choice you make at one time in your life to leave your mother and father and cleave to another person. And it’s a choice you make every day thereafter, to love your spouse in spite of the times he or she may let you down or disappoint you, or simply in spite of the times when your own feelings fade as, perhaps, the newness and excitement of young passion wear off.
If you know us, you know that Tim and I are not a super-affectionate couple. Yet knowing that he is committed to me, to our children, and to our marriage, and knowing that his love is constant, gives me a sense of security and confidence that could come from nowhere else. Over the years I find myself struggling less and less with worry, stress, and anxiety. I credit this in no small part to Tim’s leadership of our family. He has proven himself time and again, and I rest easy knowing he will always do everything in his power to provide for and care for his family.
Happy anniversary, sweetheart, and I ask that God will give us many, many more.
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