Several afternoons ago I sat the baby on the carpet and took my sweet husband by the hands. As the children played around us I looked into his eyes and said, "I need you to know that in this beautiful life of ours, everything good and hard that has happened....our children, our adventures, our life, YOU are my greatest dream come true. I don't know what is going to happen or where we will end up but it doesn't matter, because the deepest dream of my heart is already a reality."
He needed to hear it, I needed to say it....
He is my greatest dream come true.
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| The night he proposed to me, what joy! |
It came to me in my early morning prayer time. I was reflecting on Hannah and her prayer of grief and torment as she begged to be blessed with a son. The writer of the reflection commented that hope transforms prayer from pleading to worship. It brought me back to my broken anxious prayers for someone who would see me, love me, and want me as I am with all my quirks. Broken and fragile from a previous relationship with a man who didn't care enough to be faithful, and who liked to use words like "pathetic" to describe me, I wondered if my heart's shape had become too disfigured to fit another's.
Then this boy came along, not really a man yet, and he wore his nobility of heart on his sleeve. He truly was so captivated by me, my mind, my face, my heart, my dreams that he sometimes was lost for words. I brought him to his knees, and he brought me to mine, and together we prayed a prayer of praise for this love that seemed like a fairy tale. I was so captivated by his eager search for truth and his determined virtue, and his big dreams! We were going to conquer the world together.
Fast forward all of these years in our love story and we are tired. We have three beautiful exhausting children, and to top it all of he has been without steady income for a half a year. Most days it feels like we are just keeping our heads above water, and we fall asleep holding pinkies or touching feet with a nursing baby hogging the space in between us.
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| Our little Ezekiel's baptism day |
I became disillusioned because with his previous steady income came a flood of exciting possibilities. Perhaps we could buy a home, take a warm vacation, start putting some money away for retirement, renew our wedding vows in Italy, buy Joe the truck of his dreams, educate our children how and where we want, etc etc etc. It sort of went away overnight when the company he was working for had to be put on the shelf in the midst of our struggling economy.
And so it feels like we have been in the trenches, and as I am keeping the home and educating our children, he is doing battle to bring in enough to live off of. He feels like he is letting us down, and he feels responsible for any struggles we might have, even though he is not! And we both are tempted to feel like our dreams are becoming farther away.
Until I realized my dream is standing right beside me each day, through thick and thin. Those other "dreams" would be nice, but they are fluff and he is the real deal.
...in the midst of the grief, the cross, or the exhaustion, he is patient, devoted, determined, hard working, tender, and funny. He loves our children magnificently and witnesses to them what it looks like when a husband loves his wife with all his heart and will. Who knows if he will change the world as a career man, but he is absolutely changing the world through how he loves his family.
All is grace. "When all is grace we can wait out our pain and longing in hope. When all is grace, we can give God back our answered prayers in faith. When all is grace, we can see salvation coming in glimpses and flashes, and take up our place in its story. When all is grace, we can be drunk with grief and bold with hope all at once. Because this is just what salvation is: the cradle and the cross, the grace and the stone rolled away, the dark days before a savior and the lit up skies of 'Hosanna in the highest.'"
All glory to God! How fortunate I am.
