Participating in a letter writing challenge at “the Run A Muck”…encouraging others about marriage. It ain’t easy. This week for the challenge I wanted you to  know, that we know,  how hard  marriage can be, that there is seasons. If you are in a dry one now? You just might come through the other side. This week? Writing on patience…

Dear Joel,

Patience isn’t my strong suit is it? I am prone to bluster and slam when I get overwhelmed. And you. There are few things you love less that errands. Especially while you wait to go shopping for pirate ships (this really happened…just yesterday) and I insist on car washes and hair cuts. We have never been two of a kind.

These children of ours, push me way beyond and over myself and I fall off the edge of the 1 Corinthian 13 love. It is easy to believe that verse when you don’t have to look at yourself in your spouses eyes after you quote it, reminded that you are not all that you once thought you were cracked up to be. Love is patient? And I know for the 1000 time that I still have so much to learn about love.

I am expectant of perfection in the here and today, and it turns out? Life isn’t. I wasted years of our marriage waiting for us to find it. I expected this thing to be a certain way. It isn’t.

You say ‘it is, what it is’ and you turn broken to beautiful over and over. And turns out?  That is so much better.

Over and over, in all the paths of life, we learn the hard days make the easy ones sweetest. How the best things in life cost the most, and that is true in relationship, in education, in ministry, in parenting, in Jesus chasing and letting the dross get refined. All of it. Escaping to soon means that you didn’t make it to the sun rise comin’.

We learn what is important too, and what romance really is. I remember how that one time, I was 18 years old and had gone to the movies with a bunch of friends. As we are sometimes prone to, I went with the girls to a romantic era film (Emma perhaps?), I returned all weepy eyed and weak in the knees and you picked me up and carried me to my front door kissed me on the forehead and turned and left. As romantic as that was, we both know that it the simplicity of the everyday that sparks more than anything like that. I’ve never loved you more than when you let me make mad messes in the kitchen, which you clean without comment. That is love.

I don’t want our marriage to be complicated. Life is hard its true.

You are my team. Thats it.

I know people who put all sorts of pressure on each other, they tie weight onto each word and onto their spouses foot. It makes them sink. They try to make their marriage a perfect model; make the family present well. Lets never go there ok? Perfect fails. And you won’t find anything like that around here. Lets be perfect only in our pursuit of selfless…others can keep their posed photos and coordinated outfits (though…does blogging marriage mean I am trying to create illusion? I hope not. I catch the irony though).

Patience. It has cost plenty to bring us here hasn’t it? I don’t think we are done learning it yet.

But.

There is no one else on earth I would want to learn it for.

Yours.

Meliss

PS….We will miss you this weekend. We are praying for you and waiting patiently…dreadfully proud to be yours.

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