The Vows

Cara,
I know that it is only through the grace and love of Jesus that I can make these vows to you. So I commit to you that I will always pursue you through His eyes.
I vow to love you when it is easy, but especially when it is difficult.
I vow to celebrate and cherish you and to pursue us as a couple before I pursue myself.
I commit to working through and processing the impossible things that life drops before us.
I vow to give my heart to you and only you.
I promise to take swing lessons with you!
I vow to hear you and your needs, your desires, and your dreams.
I vow to challenge us to pursue lives that continuously reflect the love of Jesus.
I vow to pursue God and His direction for our lives.
I vow to identify and work on things in my life that might keep me from an intimate relationship with you or things that might hinder our pursuit of God.
I vow to hold your anxieties, fears, and doubts in the arms of our marriage.
I vow to buy you flowers for no special occasion.
I vow to treat you with respect and honor.
I vow to laugh with you, sing off-key with you, boogie with you, cry with you, celebrate with you, make babies with you, walk in the park with you, nap with you, make decisions with you, tickle you, travel with you, and share my entire life with youÂ… till death do us part!

Herb,
I commit myself first to Jesus Christ, and it is through faith in His goodness and love that I commit myself secondly to you.
I will freely share my heart, my thoughts, and my body with you. I will not hold back any part of myself from you.
I will listen to you – even when I am not feeling heard.
I will laugh and play with you; I will dance with you in the kitchen and kiss you in the rain. I promise to always keep you guessing!
I will journey, explore, and adventure alongside you – even when the path seems uncertain and the outcome is unknown.
I will honor you with my actions and my words; when I speak to you or about you to others.
I will stay with you and be faithful through the best and worst that life may have to offer us.
I will encourage you when you are discouraged.
I will challenge you to become the man God designed you to become.
I will be patient with you.
I vow to look beyond your individual needs or my individual needs – instead, I will focus on what our relationship will benefit from. I will not take a fighting stance with you or defend myself against you – instead, I will trust that you are fighting for me and our relationship!
I will show you in small ways that I love you – I won’t wait for a fight to show you how much I care.
I will learn to assume the best of you – rejoicing in the truth of who you are and refusing to assume the worst of you.
I will hold you, squeeze you, and smile at you . . . I will be your partner and your
friend . . . until death do us part!


WOW! Looking back, through clear eyes . . . as a wife, not a fiance . . . not a bride-to-be . . . these vows take on such a different meaning. They have such heftier implications and responsibilities. The funny thing about these vows is that we promised things we are not capable of. And funnier, things we had never even attempted to do before . . . things we didn't even know if we are capable of doing. And we are educated, intuitive people. . . so had we read these vows objectively . . . had they been somebody elses wedding vows . . . I think we would have both said - "WOW! That is a big commitment. Are you ready to promise those things? Do you even understand what you are committing to?"

But maybe that is the funny thing God does when you fall in love. You loose some objectivity. You become overcome with emotion and excitement about the future. And you are capable of making promises that God knows you won't be able to keep . . . at least not all of them . . . all of the time.

I mean, "I will assume the best of you . . . " This from the girl who has been suspicious of everyone, her entire life? In general, I assume the worst about most things most of the time and now I have committed to always assuming the best of the one person who will have total access to me . . . the one person who is most capable of fully loving me . . . the one person most capable of fully devastating me? I am going to always assume the best of him? Wow, I don't even assume that the barista at Starbucks has my best intentions in mind - how did I think I would be able to do this with Herb?

Loss of objectivity. Stary eyes. God clouds our judgment, I think, for a little while . . . so that we won't be scared off of marriage. Because if we really knew the implications of trying to fully love another human being . . . I don't think we would ever make the commitment. Because we just are not capable.

That is the point of marriage, I think. Or one of the points . . . to learn how to love. I mean, really love. Not love, in the sense of infactuation and attraction and finding the other person undeniably charming and hilarious . . . Love in the sense of sacrifice. Comprimise. Honoring. Seriving. Going to the grocery store after you are already in your pajamas because your spouse needs cough medicine. And doing it with a kind heart. Giving the other person a break, even when they have been a bonehead.

Real love. It really has very very little to do with your feelings for the other person. Has little to do with how cute or funny or charming they are. It has to do with you. And your heart. And your willingness to get over yourself for another person. It doesn't even have much to do with feelings. It is more about action and perspective.


SO, a year later, I look back at these vows. And I value them. They are funny though. Kind of like going down to my mom's basement and pulling out the big plastic tubs full of finger paintings from kindergarten and three sentence paragrpahes from 3rd grade. They are sweet. Kind of funny. Because you know more now than you did then.

But the beauty is in the process . . . in the learning. You must finger paint before you can create the Sistene Chapel.

Marriage: A Tool for the Depraved? VOL. 6

When Herb and I were going through pre-marital counseling, we were asked by our counselor to think about the areas we might struggle in. We replied that while we knew there would be difficulties, we could not answer that question until we were in the middle of it.

Well, we are in the middle of it. We are in a relationship with the least amount of boundaries that there can be between two people. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, our close friends and roommates have stumbled across the occasional glimpse behind the curtain. They make their way back until the inevitable happens. They stop. They reach a point at which, despite their love for us, they can go no further. You know what I mean. We have all seen parts of our friends that we just don't want to approach. Their drudge. Their junk. We see it. Clearly. Often, we are even affected by it. But to really address it often requires that we pay a cost that is far too high - it is incongruent with the actual value of the relationship. Instead, we navigate and negotiate the relationship and our boundaries so as to be the least impacted while avoiding all unnecessary conflict.

This is not what we desired in our marriage. We have done our best to blur the lines between where one begins and the other ends. Our goal has been to combine ourselves, our things, and our hearts as much as possible in order to make it impossible to separate us from each other. We wanted the other person to see "everything".

In taking down all of the curtain we have with other people, we are exposed. We have given another person the privelage to not only go behind the curtain, but to take it down, fold it up, and put it on the top shelf in the linen closet . . . that infamous shelf where we put things we don't want to throw away, but we know we will never use again. Without the curtain hanging their to protect us, everything is fair game. We are being seen like never before. Feedback that nobody has ever dared to share is being heaped on faster than we know how to process it.

We are frightened. We are angry. What we see is difficult. And being seen is even more difficult. I don't think we realized that creating the deepest type of intimacy that we are capable of creating during the first months of marriage would hurt so badly.

Blending ourselves means that what's mine is yours. So, in addition to acquiring my witty sense of humor, an all access pass to the fruits of my kitchen skills, and my quirky view of the world, Herb got all of the sour stuff too. The student loans, a wild set of in-laws, and an old Honda Civic. Wait, it gets better. Herb gained the baggage that comes from being a part of a broken family, having a mild case of depression, and the world view of a narcissist. Who would have guessed all of that was wrapped up in that pretty white dress and gauzy veil?

The reality is that "having and holding" one another is a big job. "Having" always seemed like a good thing. "Sure, I would love to have some ice cream." Having has never so much seemed like "choking down" to either one of us. There is a lot to have and a lot to hold and it takes more than nine months to learn how to do so. Our new marriage is not strong enough to hold the weight of "having and holding" all that has been presented to us by the other. So we wait, endure, fight, and make-up. Rinse and repeat. It is disheartening, sometimes, to see the commitment to your love turning out to be the hardest thing you have ever done. And, again, it is harder to see your love struggle so hard to love you.

In my most dramatic, selfish, and fatalistic moments, I want to walk down the street, pass the park, and forget how to go home.

Last night I happened to glance at my wedding vows. They are posted on my laptop but I try not to look at them because they do little more than make me feel like a complete failure as a wife. However, this little line stood out to me, "I will journey, explore, and adventure alongside you - even when the path seems uncertain and the outcome is unkown."

I have no idea how to get to where the path is leading us. Most days, I can't actually see the path. I often want to sit in a corner in the basement and wait for the hard part to pass. I want to fast-forward us about 25 years. In this fantasy, my hair will be cool - wirey silver ringlets. I will have a huge ass and I will wear a lot of velvet tunics and bangle bracelets. Herb will have a gaggle of neighborhood teenagers that follow him around for no aparant reason and call him Chief. He will chase the neighborhood cats with more urgency than he does now. He will develop an odd laugh and call me "Queenie" and pinch my huge velvet clad ass in front of our friends and neighbors to make them squirm. And we will like each other. Really like each other. We will banter in the kitchen as kids and dogs run between us. We will see the other's junk and we will call them on it without personalizing it.

But my wedding vow was prepared for the present reality and prescribes a different approach than a sojourn in the basement for a "Sex and the City and Sudoku party" scheduled to last until the year 2031. "Journey, explore, and adventure". Three very strong verbs. A verb is an action word. This means I cannot sit down and wait for this part to end. It means I have already committed to staying actively engaged. So I I come out of the basement and come alongside of Herb; verbing as much as I can.

The Promises We Keep

During this part of our ceremony Herb whispered: "Wow, that's a lot of salt." To which I replied (either audibly or in my mind. I don't remember - I was the bride so I don't have to remember!), "Well, it's a big commitment!"

The final part of Herb's wedding vows to me:
"I vow to laugh with you, sing off-key with you, boogie with you, cry with you, celebrate with you, make babies with you, walk in the park with you, nap with you, make decisions with you, tickle you, travel with you, and share my entire life with you until death do us part!"

It is so easy to get caught up in looking for big indicators of his love for me. But as I re-read these vows today, I realize that he shows me that he loves me all the time. Just the other night, we laid on our bed, and sang (off-key of course!) through the script of the musical RENT. It was so sweet, so simple, so unplanned. . . but so romantic and so saturated with Herb's vows. Saturated with Herb's heart.

So we laid there, on our regular bed in our regular house, after a night at church, after onion rings at Spanky's and before Grey's Anatomy. In the middle of our normal life, we lived our vows, singing:

"There is no future. There is not past. I live this moment. As my last. There's only us. There's only this. Forget regret. Or life is yours to miss. No other road. No other way. No day but today."

And as a sidenote: regarding the lame date you went on a few weeks ago, Kelly - straight men DO like musical theatre! You go girl! That man was not worth your while! But you already knew that! And that is reason 238 why I love you.

And as another sidenote: The blue behind us in this picture is not stained glass . . . it is Colorado's autumn indigo night sky. How lovely!