i worry, you know.
i worry that i don’t accurately show you how broken i am.
i worry that you think i’m a good person, or that i have the God-thing all figured out, or that i never get lonely, or never wonder if people like me.
every time i post, it is a battle. will they like these words? but MORE than that… will they accept me, and the heart behind my words?
and remembering, in the end, it’s about God. it’s all about him.
and so i write the following with trembling hand, because i don’t want you to think my marriage is perfect, either. we fight. we argue. we’re getting better at the whole dance… we’re learning we need space before we can come together again after the kids go to bed, and we’re learning when a person is on edge and when they need a back massage and not a lecture. (when does anyone ever need a lecture, anyway?)
and trent is not romantic. he tries. he really does, but ever since he picked me up from university one day and told me he’d thought of buying me flowers but had bought us a take-out pizza instead, i knew it would be a life without roses, and that’s okay. i prefer pizza and beer anyway. most of the time.
but he IS sacrificial.
i have a sacrificial husband.
and the older i get, the more this matters. this Jesus in him. and the older i get, and the more marriages i see failing, the more i wonder if this isn’t at the heart of a long-lasting love? this sacrifice?
this weekend i got sick–hanging over the toilet, perspiring kind of sick, the kind that makes you need your mother–and it was the one weekend trent had planned to go away with his friends. he never goes away with his friends. at most, he has hockey, a couple of times a week, but i’m the one who always gets to go off on trips. so this was his big chance. he was heading for what they called an epic snowboarding trip and then i got sick. but i told him to go anyway. i had his mother in law, and she had the kids, and i would just lay in bed and i really wanted him to go. i did.
(because we as wives need to sacrifice too. we’re great, as mothers, at sacrifice. but often, as wives, we could use a little work.)
but he didn’t.
he didn’t go. he stayed home with me, and he rose with our kids in the night, and he let me sleep in, in the mornings, and he made us all supper and emptied the dishwasher, and he never once complained.
and my vase is full of fake flowers. i bought them at the dollar store because i didn’t marry a romantic.
but i don’t know that all of the roses in the world could turn this girl’s heart the way a sacrificial man can.
because sacrifice, Jesus cries from the tree where he hangs, is everything.
sacrifice is love.