6 weeks into forever
last night i started thinking about all sorts of crazy life things. peter and i have been talking about where we'll go on our 10th anniversary trip, and it made me think about how crazy time is. it made me think about how crazy it is that we've been married for almost 10 years. how crazy it is that once we hit 11 years i'll have had his name for half as long as i had my own.
and then i started thinking back to the very beginning. we went on our first date at the beginning of november, started "officially" dating at the beginning of december, and i knew i wanted to marry him by mid-january.
that in and of itself is rather crazy - which is probably why i didn't tell anyone back then. i remember exactly where i was sitting, but i couldn't tell you what state i was in at the time.
i was on a road trip with the family i nannied for, and deeann and i were talking about life, and marriage, and she was telling me about some of the more mundane, everyday things that are part of marriage.
after that conversation i wrote in my journal for a bit while all of the kiddos were content in the car. i wrote about how i knew in that moment that i wanted to be the one to make sure that peter had clean socks and deodorant every day.
i wanted to make sure that he was taken care of even in the simple little everyday mundane things.
it wasn't some huge grand gesture that made me want a life with him. it was knowing that i wanted him to be next to me every day. i wanted him to be the one i do this whole life thing with. i wanted him to be the one i was next to even when we had to do all the boring stuff.
that was in january of 2003.
as weird as it is that i "knew" when we were only 6 weeks into forever, the year we got engaged {3 years after we started dating} peter told me he knew even sooner.
he doesn't have a deodorant and socks story, but he said by the time we rang in 2003 he knew we would ring in all of our new years together.
of course this isn't to say there weren't ever any doubts. in fact he almost waited too long to pop the question. i wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, but if he wasn't going to ask me to, i wasn't going to wait around for much longer.
and then he did.
and as they say - the rest is history.
it's so strange now to think back to the inches of life. sometimes one little thing shifting one little bit wouldn't have made any difference at all. other times it changes everything.
it's like that story that emilio estevez tells in the mighty ducks - "a quarter of an inch, charlie".
most sports are games of inches. they are games of skill, and games of luck - both. and you need both.
but life also comes down to a whole lot of "inches". literal and metaphorical inches. when you stop to think about how close everything is to being entirely different it's kind of crazy. we don't know exactly what would have happened had something shifted even just a fraction of an inch. {this is why that "if only..." game we all play is pointless at the end of the day. we have no idea how things would've gone down. we have no idea what all would've been affected had that one thing happened differently.}
we don't know what the future holds.
we don't know what the future holds, but just like the timing of our engagement 10 years ago, i have to trust that i know who holds the future. i have to trust that God is in control of everything.
i have to trust that he is at the center of the greater story. because that's the only way life makes sense to me. otherwise we're all just striving after the wind.
i know that sounds rather melancholy in some ways, but it's not meant to be. because our lives don't have to be just about us. they are part of a larger story. we are part of a larger story.
we get to take part in something much bigger than ourselves.
and that is nothing short of amazing.
and then i started thinking back to the very beginning. we went on our first date at the beginning of november, started "officially" dating at the beginning of december, and i knew i wanted to marry him by mid-january.
that in and of itself is rather crazy - which is probably why i didn't tell anyone back then. i remember exactly where i was sitting, but i couldn't tell you what state i was in at the time.
i was on a road trip with the family i nannied for, and deeann and i were talking about life, and marriage, and she was telling me about some of the more mundane, everyday things that are part of marriage.
after that conversation i wrote in my journal for a bit while all of the kiddos were content in the car. i wrote about how i knew in that moment that i wanted to be the one to make sure that peter had clean socks and deodorant every day.
i wanted to make sure that he was taken care of even in the simple little everyday mundane things.
it wasn't some huge grand gesture that made me want a life with him. it was knowing that i wanted him to be next to me every day. i wanted him to be the one i do this whole life thing with. i wanted him to be the one i was next to even when we had to do all the boring stuff.
that was in january of 2003.
as weird as it is that i "knew" when we were only 6 weeks into forever, the year we got engaged {3 years after we started dating} peter told me he knew even sooner.
he doesn't have a deodorant and socks story, but he said by the time we rang in 2003 he knew we would ring in all of our new years together.
of course this isn't to say there weren't ever any doubts. in fact he almost waited too long to pop the question. i wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, but if he wasn't going to ask me to, i wasn't going to wait around for much longer.
and then he did.
and as they say - the rest is history.
it's so strange now to think back to the inches of life. sometimes one little thing shifting one little bit wouldn't have made any difference at all. other times it changes everything.
it's like that story that emilio estevez tells in the mighty ducks - "a quarter of an inch, charlie".
most sports are games of inches. they are games of skill, and games of luck - both. and you need both.
but life also comes down to a whole lot of "inches". literal and metaphorical inches. when you stop to think about how close everything is to being entirely different it's kind of crazy. we don't know exactly what would have happened had something shifted even just a fraction of an inch. {this is why that "if only..." game we all play is pointless at the end of the day. we have no idea how things would've gone down. we have no idea what all would've been affected had that one thing happened differently.}
we don't know what the future holds.
we don't know what the future holds, but just like the timing of our engagement 10 years ago, i have to trust that i know who holds the future. i have to trust that God is in control of everything.
i have to trust that he is at the center of the greater story. because that's the only way life makes sense to me. otherwise we're all just striving after the wind.
i know that sounds rather melancholy in some ways, but it's not meant to be. because our lives don't have to be just about us. they are part of a larger story. we are part of a larger story.
we get to take part in something much bigger than ourselves.
and that is nothing short of amazing.
xoxo
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