Lindsay

I had an epiphany on Saturday… a simple one.

“My wife is amazing.”

We got married on March 9th of 2007 after dating for almost two years (including our engagement). In those two years we almost broke up 643 times. We were at a wedding expo in Phoenix just a few months before the big day and we got in a huge fight. “Should we even do this?” she asked. I replied, “YES! I won’t end this over a lie.”

We always fought about the same thing: trust. My wife had recently experienced some first-hand betrayal from multiple people she loved deeply, and it had affected her relationship with me big time. She just couldn’t trust me, no matter what I said or did to prove that she could. She was seriously wounded.

We both wear our feelings on our sleeves, so when our relationship was on the rocks people knew it. It literally made the papers one time when an article was written about my church in a local paper. One of the online commenters said, “It looks like they hate each other.” I wanted to track that guy down and slap him (in Jesus’ name), but he was right. I’m sure it looked that way sometimes.

You ever heard the phrase, “I love you but I don’t like you right now”? Lindsay has.

When we received premarital counseling we joked that we had already been through more than the married couple leading us through it. They’d been married 20 years and we had already climbed steeper mountains. That may or may not be true, but it felt like it.

We didn’t break up, even when she took her ring off one day. Even when I was a horrible boyfriend and husband, we stayed together. Even after the miscarriage when our world felt like hell, we stayed together.

Last Saturday it hit me hard that I am married to an amazing woman. I’ve known it all along, but it was a heavy moment for me as I played the movie of our relationship in my head. These past couple years have been so good. Our relationship is better than ever. We would never know this kind of love if we had given up.

So many couples break up when things get difficult. They look for a new love, hoping Cupid will shoot that love arrow into someone else. So many people just give up, and never get to experience what we’re experiencing right now. A love that has been tested and has endured, because it is rooted in God’s promises.

We know that God is using our marriage to do more than just make us happy. He’s using it to make us holy.

We heard about another pastor that had cheated on his wife recently, and we both got upset and sad about it. I tried to break the tension by saying, “I’m a little tired of these pansy husbands who keep cheating on their wives because things at home aren’t perfect. Most of their wives aren’t half as difficult as you’ve been and I’ve never cheated on you!”

I love her because she laughed and then gave me a look that said “You’re right, but I’ll kill you if you ever say that again.”