Do you want to know when this picture was taken?
That would be 10 years ago to the day! My wife Christine and I celebrate TEN years of marriage together today.
That was then.
This is now.
Ten years feels like it’s a short time, but when we reflect on it there’s been a lot of life lived. When you think back, I feel like you’re supposed to remember the “good times”, the happy times. That’s not what comes to mind, though we’ve had great moments and plenty of fun celebrations and family moments.
When I think back I think of the major life transitions we’ve walked through and the challenges and the pain. The joys and challenges of having three kids enter our lives and transform them. But I also think of the impact of our first pregnancy – a miscarriage. I think of some really difficult ministry transitions – that were timely and the right thing to do, but came at a cost and were difficult. Perhaps the most defining moment was my wife going into the hospital with her water broken/leaking at 27 weeks and us waiting it out until Morgan was born in the 30 week range. Four weeks of bedrest in a hospital together praying, eating hospital food, and watching Carrie Underwood work her way to an American Idol win.
Then there were the two months of NICU life after that while our 3 lb little girl adjusted to life outside the womb. That general period also involved Christine getting diagnosed with Cancer and Morgan getting diagnosed with cerebral palsy (mild form). I don’t know if anything shaped us as a couple like those three months. But these 10 years also have involved 8 years of part-time seminary, 10 years of ministry fund raising (which if you’ve done it you know it can be a marriage tester like no other), a good year of significant depression for me and many other successes and failures. I suppose these things can tempt people to grow apart or come together in greater intimacy. For us, these experiences have shaped us and our marriage and brought us closer together.
Most of the last 10 years were pretty hard actually. Some of it was circumstances and things out of our control and some of it was working through our own character journeys to meet the demands of our realities. But besides the Lord, there was one constant – each other.
It was a challenging decade as a whole, but marriage has never really been a challenge. We’ve had fun. It’s been meaningful and deep. We’ve enjoyed working together both as we lead our family and as we work together vocationally. Marriage is hard work and it sharpens and refines us – that has been true for us as well. But on a lot of levels it’s been easy – because at the end of the day there’s no one else I want to be with and spend my time with. We just like being together – maybe that’s why we married 🙂
So Happy 10th Anniversary to my awesome wife Christine today! Here’s to a few more decades together God-willing. Love you!