One Year Closer

One year ago I stood in front of my closest friends and family, beside a man who had become my best friend - who I was absolutely in love with and pretty crazy about. I was so excited to start our life together. I was excited to start and end each day beside him. To dream up plans and reach goals with him. To have all of our first moments. I was excited to make a home together and to go on trips with no curfew restraining us. I was excited to have freedom and to not have to say goodnight.

If there was one thing I could say about this past year, it would be that it was not what I expected. It didn't become the perfect year I was excited to experience.

It was a year of difficult decisions and frustrating forgiveness. A year of hard-working days and evening exhaustion. A year of messy kitchens and dirty laundry, late night paper writing and early morning shifts at work. A year of arguments we never thought we would have. A year of laughter and tears, ups and downs, tight budgets and unexpected blessings. A year of learning things about myself that I didn't want to admit. Like that I am shamefully stubborn and opinionated. I lack patience and grace, and I am a more selfish person than I ever thought before.

It was a year of learning things about the man I thought I knew. Like how he is also so much stronger, more passionate, more loving and kind and insurmountably patient than the man I thought I was marrying. He is more gracious and forgiving and hard-working and selfless than I imagined he could be. I am incredibly undeserving of a love so sweet. But still, he is still as equally imperfect as I am.

We are two incredibly imperfect people who are loved by the only Perfect God.

In my devotions this morning I was reading about how the Israelites finally made it to the Red Sea and then let themselves fall into a crisis state, thinking they would never be able to make it across the sea and wondering why God led them so far for nothing. God's response is really what got me.

Go forward. Move on.

One of my biggest struggles is with moving on. I especially get so stuck on small situations and insignificant problems that I forget how meaningless they are in the grand scheme of things. And even more than that, getting "stuck" doesn't help anything. Of course the Red Sea was not something small and insignificant, but I mean, if God can lead us through things so big, then of course we can get through things so small.

There was something else I realized too.

Making it to a year of marriage is not what matters most. What matters most is that we're still going. It's that we wake up every morning and make the choice to keep loving, no matter how we're feeling. To give when we have nothing left to offer. To love when our sinful nature tells us not to. To serve when we would rather be selfish. To get up when we would rather stay in bed. To move forward. 

We will never get it perfect. But what matters is that we're one year closer to being who we are meant to be - as a husband and wife, as a man and a woman, as servants of Him.

Now that we can say we have been married for a year, we can also say we love each other one year more. We understand our imperfections one year more. We have been stretched and humbled one year more.

And with every step forward, we are one more step closer to forever.