Dear Joel,

It is 4:30 in the morning. Do you hear that? The song birds are here. I was talking about the silence of this place recently. The way I can hear a crow flap overhead as it passes. How there seemed to be a lack of the birds who sing. All it took was two bird feeders and a bag of seed. Now they sing non-stop. Sometimes I am amazed at the minuscule acts it takes to help life thrive and expand.

I’ve been living like an eighteen year old this week. Two concerts in two nights. Like that is something women in their middle thirties should do. You kiss my forehead and send me on my way, HAVE FUN, you say. You can’t come, because… youth. Fifteen years of Thursday nights, you have been in the same place. After all these years. You call me as Ruth Moody breaks into Hallelujah in the Dream Cafe. I hold up the phone. You say it again…ENJOY.

I used to think that to co-labour meant we WORKED side by side. That service was only about how many floors I could sweep in your wake. Now I think it is much more than that. We are co-labourers with Christ. I am your helper in becoming more like Christ, to aid in the rebirth, your life made over. A midwife to the work of the spirit in you. That doesn’t sound very sexy, but I think it is the truth. My central role in your life is not to make you meat loaf. No. My role is to help Christ birth in you more and more. My role is to call you out to LIFE. To the truest sense of yourself. I’m afraid it might involve a motorcycle, but I made promise to never diminish your dreams, my vow was to help make them true. Can you dream a few safer ones from now on?

You do the same. You free me to become all I was called to. People ask how I do so many things, I tell them, Joel makes room. He invites me to BE. He kisses me on the forehead and says GO.

So many marriages seek to constrain and contain each other. Thanks for being the kind of husband that scatters the seed, invites this wild bird heart to sing.

Meliss

(Linking with Seth and Amber Haines. I love these letters…believing that chasing hard after our marriages we can help you to do the same. You can read all of my letters here)

Dear Joel,

First of all I just need to say:

No… but really. So good. And it keeps getting better. This summer I noticed the flecks of salt and I told you “Your beard is good” but you didn’t believe me though I meant it. Each fleck of white to me, a part of our story. The moments I let you down or scared you. One for each night you’ve slept on bare boards or barely carpeted floors at churches all over the northwest. One for the wandering sheep your heart is breaking for. Yes. It is telling a story that beard of yours…it is telling our story…our part in the Great Story.

I was out recently with a group of women. We all got married that same summer. It was a blur of tulle, showers and trips to Ikea for PINE FURNITURE and DUVET COVERS. We all longing to look mostly the same (but don’t you dare copy me). Anyways, we were out that night and someone said “sometimes I think I am only still married because I would hate to have to hash out all the logistics again” and someone else responded “not to mention that someone would have to see you naked for the first time again. Ew”. Guess what? Nobody panicked and prepped her for a marital intervention. Only those with a fifteen year old marriage could say such things and know what we mean. It isn’t that we don’t love each other…its just that life is hard and history is complicated and sometimes it is tempting to want to start over with someone who you could convince of your goodness…someone less aware of the flaws you bear. There ain’t much we are hiding. Our flesh bears all our mutual wounds…

Once upon a time when we were just babies, and thought we knew what becoming one flesh would mean we stood up and made magnificent vows. We could not know what we were saying, what a stretch it would be, how we would be marked and scarred by each other, by the dreams God gave us.

I was running on the treadmill today (I mostly just wanted to tell someone that) our wedding photos and our vows are hanging above me and I got to thinking. Thinking how I’m trying to run off the stomach that grew to house our babies. The few we never got to hold and the ones we’ll hold forever. I’m running off the pure white carbs we ate for ten straight summers on the shores of Shuwap, as we built something beautiful together. I’m running off that celebratory beverage. Somehow we found a way to celebrate a Tuesday….it is my favorite thing about you, the way you find a way to see the good in most everything…even me.

My flesh bears our story too (but don’t worry I will keep running).

We are passing our mid thirties now, closing in on 15 years marriage, 20 years since our first date. We’ve been knitting our lives for longer than we were knit into separate entities. The truth is DNA mixing is messy though, flesh of my flesh.

But don’t you know? There are more stories to tell. There is more great ministry to pour from our flesh being stretched, our bones aching weary. There is more supernatural strength for us to walk in. There is more hope for this world and the redeeming work of God in our marriage can be that. Our home can be a place that people can gather from cold realities and feel just a few moments of warmth.

We’ve seen a wide swath of what the world could toss at us, both the high and the low. It is terrifying and thrilling to think of what else our reality might need to stretch to include. There is no one I could do this life with but you.

And when we are old and you are more gray and (lets just be real) I am just a tiny bit chubbier we will curl up on the couch, our story told, our ministry to each other just beginning, and…

image from http://www.etsy.com/listing/119708973/i-want-to-stroke-your-beard-like-its-a =

(Linking with Amber and friends believing that telling the story of how marriage is hard-but-worth-it will help others coming up behind us to go hard after their marriages too)

And if you are looking for more of my marriage letters you can find them here

The luckiest girl in the world…

To the King of the Exclamation Point,

My friend Michelle asked me what my Myers Briggs personality type was last week. I told her and then out of curiosity read a description (it had been a long time ago at work that I learned I am a Dreamer/Idealist. Who knew?). I couldn’t stop reading it aloud to you and being appalled by the fact that I am a raging cliché (which INFPs hate…read about that in paragraph 3). We did your typing next and then held the pair up side by side and marvelled at a marriage that has stood nearly 15 years…we could not be more different. You the king of the exclamation point, me…the queen of the ellipsis.

You’ve noticed that haven’t you? The way I have no capacity to finish a thought, how it keeps spinning and spinning around my head. We will have a conversation and then an hour later I will pipe up with no lead in about what I was trying to say. You have no idea what I am talking about…that conversation for you ended an hour ago with an exclamation point. It is midpoint of our ministry summer, and summer is the time of year when we forget how to communicate. We actually have to repeat things several times for the other to understand. You say we get out of rhythm. That is the truth, for it takes a fine balance to match your exclamation points with all of my ellipses…

You are a preacher. I am a storyteller. Preachers say it is finished. Story tellers keep tracking the back story…but then what happens? You can see it in your sermons, your emails, your invitations to people. You can see it in my text messages, my tweets (even when I am desperate to save characters)…I even tried to slip an ellipsis into an academic piece once. Turns out ellipsis are not part of APA format (learn to use a comma for Petes sake Melissa).

It says a lot about how we process the world. The black and white you see. The gray I get lost in.

I’ve been having those dreams again this summer. You know the ones? Cold sweats, full run, beating heart.  My anxiety has raised its ugly head for the first time in a few years, and though I can manage the beast just fine during the day when the night falls it is a different story. You will find me searching the house for someone or something.  It crossed my mind as I watched you swim with the littles today that maybe it is you I am always looking for, worried about. Or maybe it runs away further when I don’t see you here, always so calm, so dependable, so reliable.

We both know the truth of this thing don’t we? How you are the stabilizing force. How I am desperate for you to put an end to certain thoughts. To finish an idea. To start a new conversation. To have hope in our outcome when, if left to my own devices I would never, ever stop with the “WHAT IFS?”. We both know the truth of it…me without you? I would be under the train for sure…caught in the wreckage of too many thoughts. You are the one that tends to keep me on the tracks, pointing due North.

The first Valentines Day we spent together, I was sixteen and you picked me up in your Ford Escort, the hatch was filled with red roses and blankets and supplies to start a fire by the river. You were just getting started with your setting things on fire, punctuating most moments of our lives with the exclamation points, exuberance, excitement, finality, trust. 

I never told you this before. Three weeks before our wedding, one of my dramatic friends asked me how, someone like me, occasionally lost in my own mind with too many thoughts, and too much internal drama, how could I marry someone with a heart so light, one who carried the world in a completely different sort of basket? Could I deal with that much joy or would it drive me over some metaphoric cliff?

The truth of the matter is that she made my already cool feet turn to ice.

But she didn’t get it and I was just starting to see it. The way we were melding to bring out the best in each other. How being with you made me want to be better, stronger, faithful, honest. How your choosing me gave you some shades, freed you to pursue your call like other relationships might not. How I needed someone to make me laugh like that. How I just plain like to be with you.

It makes me laugh sometimes, all the people we know getting divorced. They say it is because they are too different. We’ve taught each other there is no such thing.

Anyways…We will fall back into rhythm soon. The fine balance of passion and stability that we teeter on.

Till then know that we are missing you something fierce this summer. We are lonely and the balance of this whole place is off… there is just something important missing.

With all my love,

The Queen of the Ellipsis

(Linking with Amber  and friends…so happy you are doing this again! I am linking this letter I wrote this summer to the man…I kept going!)

And if you are looking for more of the marriage letters you can find them here)