12/12/12, For Paul

I cannot believe I am blogging at this ungodly hour of 8:13 pm. I am so tired. Today was just one of those days where I kept waiting for an opportunity to nap but it never came. But I have to write, I want to so badly because tomorrow is a special day, it is my four year anniversary to my husband. What a beautiful day it will be, simply because it commemorates the day that vows were exchanged and a covenant was made. I wanted to write something to honor him, but also maybe ramble a bit on my takes about marriage, things I’ve learned, advice I may want to impart given my measly 4 years of marriage (hey, we’ve accomplished quite a bit!).

I seriously love my husband. Sure, I’ve always wanted to be married and was pretty sure when the day came it would be the “truly, madly, deeply” kind of love, but to this extent, I just had no idea. In my opinion, I have been a pretty rotten wife. Because marriage has not ever looked exactly like I thought it would look, and I have often deemed it unsatisfying. Let me put it like this: because our love story has never looked like a page from “The Notebook” I have muttered such phrases as, “I don’t believe in real love!” What I mean to say is, I thought that “The Notebook” depicted real love, and what Paul and I were experiencing was far, far from making risqué love in our abandoned dream house, or having sopping wet makeout sessions during a rain storm. Darn it, I failed miserably, I supposed. Now, after all we have been through, I can definitely say that we have the real thing and that the Hollywood rendition is simply crap.

Most of my readers know how Paul and I met. It’s true, we met on a singles site online which prompted our cheap bums to take the conversation over to “myspace” where our love continued to blossom. I can’t believe we fell in love on myspace….gah, we are so old. I once wanted to write a book entitled, “When ‘Myspace’ Becomes God’s Space: When God uses the web to network love,” anywho, then myspace kind of flopped, and that entire point was pointless. My point actually is that God used myspace to connect Paul and I, and that makes me laugh. He had a purpose in it though and I want to share something I learned.

Before I met Paul, I began to resent men a little bit. Let’s face it, “The Notebook” was what I thought love was supposed to look like so I found myself sorely disappointed in the whole charade. Then I found Paul: handsome, charming, strong convictions, manly, chivalrous, sexiest man alive (in my opinion), bold, enjoys boasting of his genius IQ….and on and on the list goes of what I considered attractive qualities. But I was scared out of my mind. Paul bought a ticket to visit me for the week of September 15^th, and here I was, the last week of August visiting Myrtle Beach with my family, freaking out. I was thinking that maybe I’d just skip out on the airport and not pick him up. All the while we would spend hours on the phone doing the googly love thing, but I was deeply troubled in my spirit. So one day while at the beach I took the time to walk down to the inlet by myself. My mom kept Jake because I was a single mom at the time and she wanted to offer me some alone time. I only thought I didn’t get enough alone time back then [laughing at my idiotic self]. But I went to this inlet and sat down by it and was just captivated. Where I was standing, the surroundings were hotels, fancy condos, and people everywhere. But the ocean wrapped around and created an inlet where I stood on one side, and about 25 feet across was land that was untouched. Maybe this sounds silly, but I had never beheld the ocean apart from tourism. Here it was though, pure and real. I sat on that beach and closed my eyes, “God, that is so beautiful.” I heard Him respond almost instantly in my spirit, “….that is what I have for you.” Huh? I asked him what that meant because I was confused, and He answered in a simple word, “Beauty.” That is still one of the sweetest moments I have ever had with the Lord. I sat there for awhile longer and watched the trees blowing in the wind, the white sand against an untainted blue backdrop. I skipped my way back to the house, and as soon as I could mobilize my sister, I brought her to the inlet to show her the treasure I had found. When we got there she said, “so, swim over there.”

Uh, no thank you. I am afraid of sharks, first of all, and furthermore it is dangerous to swim across inlets. That is a fact. But Mckenzie walked up to the shore and put her feet in the water, beckoning me to join her. I planted my feet in the sand and shook my head. She said, “If you think it is so pretty, or whatever {insert evil snarl here}, you should go see it.” I refused and then she said something else that totally shook me to the core. My ears heard one thing, but my spirit perceived another. “Summer, you are always so afraid to go in over your head.” The words shook me like a snow globe until all of the little pieces of fear I had about meeting Paul rose to the surface and swirled around inside me. I don’t know how it clicked in my head or my heart, but it did. If I don’t act on this thing that God has given me, I can lose it. I can lose out on beauty if I don’t trust God.

I wish I could sum up this story by saying that Mckenzie and I swam to the other side of the inlet and explored it in all it’s glorious wonder. But we did not, because once again, inlets are dangerous. Not only that, but I later found out this inlet is called “Hog’s Inlet” which must be God’s sense of humor that the place of my most earth-shaking, life-changing revelation happened at a place called “Hog’s Inlet.” In either case, I was hoping someone would benefit from this story because ultimately it was the reason I stepped out on a limb to meet my future husband at the airport a week later. And let him put a ring on my finger eleven days later. And then I flew to California 20 days later. It scared the crap out of me, but I did it because sometimes God asks us to take a chance, to trust Him. I believe trusting Him opens all kinds of doors that we can’t even imagine. Bethel leaders say “Faith is spelled R-I-S-K.” I would have to agree.

So here Paul and I are, four years into our marriage, and I am blessed more than ever. I seriously love my husband. Like, so intensely and deeply that sometimes I just follow him around like a lost puppy dog hoping he’ll hold me underneath his wing. And he usually flaps me away saying, “don’t you have anything better to do?” Sorry, that’s love folks. I was thinking about the irony though, that even though I am attracted to my husband, that really isn’t what makes me fall in love with him. Every now and then I catch him in his black ball cap with his unruly curls spilling out the bottom and it makes me really sappy, but I have figured out that contrary to popular belief (and my former beliefs anyway) that my love for him really grows over every day sort of things. Like when he sweeps the floor, takes out the trash, holds the baby, changes Sonora’s poopy diaper without making her suffer the wrath of being rinsed off in a cold shower and instead explaining grace, taking the dog on a walk because he’s so annoying, watering the plants, cutting the hair away from Reagan’s butt hole so she can poo successfully (I know, you’re thinking that Paul deals with a lot of poo…), making coffee every morning, going to work and school so he can take care of our family and follow some of his dreams, and the list goes on and on. Then there are the things that really get me. Like when he tells me that one of the reasons he loves me is because I was courageous enough to keep a baby at a really inconvenient, unstable time in my life. Or when we’re in the hospital with Jake and he offers to hold him while the IV is inserted because my nerves cannot handle the trauma of seeing my baby boy go through that. When he brings me home a Starbucks just because he knows I need coffee to survive motherhood. When he gets asked to speak in front of the church, and he’s so bold, so smart, so in love with Father God he can’t wait to teach. When a neighbor backs into his car, one of this favorite possessions, he sheds a tear in private but to the guy’s face is willing to shrug it off as “just a thing,“ just in case the guy doesn’t know Christ and needs a lesson in grace. When someone offends or hurts me, even by accident, he seems to forget his own rules about grace, and releases that intellectual jib jab he’s been gifted with. When he gets up extra early to do his homework, read the Bible, and watch a football game so he can save the morning to hang out with me. When a stranger breaks a common traffic rule and hits his parents car, pushing them into a big rig and causing their untimely deaths, being angry or vengeful never even crosses his mind. He is just the real deal. He is a really good and decent man, and if I can be this in love with him after four years, I am seriously afraid of how much my heart and soul will no longer belong to me in the years to come. What a vulnerable place to be in, but that’s the kind of risk that love takes, I have found. So I’ll just keep on giving, because so far, he has been a really great steward.

I seriously love my husband. Four years and 3 children, 5 houses, 2 really big moves later, I just say to life, “bring it on.” We’ve got this J

Paul, love you, love you, love you more than you’ll ever know. You are the beauty that God promised me that day, that captivated my heart through a landscape, and I will never be the same.