Ten Years and Just Getting Strong...

Last week we celebrated our ten year anniversary....a pretty big milestone worth recognizing.  I was trying to think of some deep revelation or great words to describe what it is like to spend that long in marriage.  I thought back through the years of life when it was just us.  I thought through the blurry  years of very little kids.  Then I ended up at present day and realized that although life seems to get better, at the same time it continues to get harder.

Marriage is work. A lot of it.  Most of it is hard and must be intentional.  It's remembering not only the commitment that you've made, but that you also play a part in your spouses mental, physical, and spiritual well being.  It's taking care of your kids all day, manually working all day, paying bills, cleaning spills, decoding what it was your spouse really meant when they said that thing that they didn't mean,  mowing the lawn, cooking supper, doing payroll, tending a garden, taking kids to lessons, camps, and Bible Schools, attempting to communicate, arranging playdates, hiring employees, clarifying what he implied and how she interpreted it,  washing the kids, washing yourselves, and then asking yourself the question...What have I done for my spouse today? 

I'll admit that after ten years of marriage and seven years of kids, I probably need the most work in this area.  Work in this area.  Because a marriage is work and a marriage forces us to get out of our own heads for a minute and attempt to get into our spouses.  I'm not good at getting into other people's heads. My own head has a lot of very nice ideas that I simply wish everyone in the world agreed with.  But I'll keep trying.

At the age of twenty six I said my vows and naively hoped for  Happily Ever After. And now at the age of thirty-six,  I wisely think, there is no other person I would want to try this hard with.