Our Love Story

This morning I woke up buried underneath covers with you. It was cold last night and our small dog, greying aging too fast, wedged between us. Our youngest babies had ended up around us, sniffing and coughing from the croup and lingering colds.

This is our love story of seven years with you my hero that leaves for a job which hurts your back, destroying your hands with grease, cuts and bruises. When you return home, late, you take out the trash without complaints. On your days off you make our children sandwiches oozing peanut butter and jelly. You build Lego towers that cover the toy room floor, couch forts that take over our living room. You can fix anything, draw anything, build anything. You are my children's superhero, lifting them as high as the ceiling and sneaking them cookies from the cabinet.

I spend my days waiting for you, cleaning our castle, washing your uniforms, making our bed, replacing worn toothbrushes with new ones, budgeting the pay you bring home. Sometimes I put on the eye makeup you like but usually you are sweeping me off my feet when I'm in work pants, covered in dirt outside from our garden, breastmilk from our nursling, cleaner or laundry detergent. My life's calling is to serve this family and you are the hero of my womanly heart, beating with love as you leave us to provide food and shelter for our tiny clan. I listen to the sound of many small feet that race to the door every night as they greet the man who has made my dreams come true.

Our love has endured through hunger, through being homeless, broke, scared and young. We made it through the four births of our children. A cross country move, two house purchases and many vehicles. We have been deserted by family and scorned by  false friends, we have lived at the mercy of grace, not knowing where our next meal might come from.

And we have this; these mornings of habit, of the getting up and going on into the unknown, whether it be to give birth, to start a new job, to attend a funeral, the readying for church as we buckle belts and smooth hair. As I nurse and you speak, as I ask and you say, "yes I'm ready."

I wasn't always ready for this hard life, in a World that seeks it's own. That hates marriage between a man and a woman, under God til' death do us part. This World that doesn't want things too difficult, too many children, too many sleepless nights, too much time and too much responsibility.

Yet here is our love story under God's grace, on a morning like this, in a chapter of our story. I look ahead, preparing myself for different seasons as we age together, and I look back at how far we have come and how we have endured.

Our wedding songs.