Reflections

As I reflect upon our first year of marriage I can't help but smile. They said this would be the hardest, but it has been the best year of our entire life. I love Garth more than I did when we said "I do." We just get each other and there is nothing more comforting than that.
As I reflect on a year ago today, just days before our wedding, I can't help but feel the excitement again. That kind of excitement that makes it hard to fall alseep and causes a smile to be plastered to your face all. the. time.

I don't think I could explain what marriage is truly all about better than Donald Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz) and Gary Thomas (author of Sacred Marriage). So I won't try. These quotes give incredible depth to the mystery of marriage:

"God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then and only then understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us." - DM

"To spiritually benefit from marriage, we have to be honest. We have to look at our disappointments, own up to ugly attitudes, and confront our selfishness." - GT

"... To wake and find you resting at my rib, to share these things that God has done, to walk you through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildered eye, you heart so slow to love, so careful to love, so sheepish that I stepped up my aim and became a man. Is this what God intended? That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in so doing revealing Him. " -DM

"What if God didn't design marriage to be 'easier'? What is God had an end in mind tht went beyond our happiness, our comfort, and our desire to be infatuated and happy as if the world were a perfect place? What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?" - GT

"I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you , and tomorrow I will do it again. " - DM

"Romantic love has no elasticity to it. It can never be stretched; it simply shatters. Mature love, the kind demanded of a good marriage, must stretch, as the sinful human condition is such that all of us bear conflicting emotions." - GT

"If the purpose of marriage was simply to enjoy infatuation and make me 'happy', then I'd have to get a 'new' marriage every two or three years. But if I really wanted to see God transform me from the inside out, I'd need to concentrate on changing myself rather than on changing my spouse." - GT

"But what most of us crave more than anything else is to be intimately close to the God who made us. If that relationship is right, we won't make such severe demands on our marriage, asking each other, expecting each other, to compensate for spiritual emptiness." - GT