Awesome!

My parents are awesome!

 

I suppose they always have been, but it wasn't until recent years that I really appreciated their awesomeness. Last Sunday was their 35^th anniversary. I wasn't there for the original wedding vows, but I can tell you how they have lived them out.

 

For better or for worse. The better I would think (at least I would hope!) are the six children they share. The worse would be the events of October 2008. Just a few days before Mom's 60^th birthday, Dad got a call at work from a neighbor and friend. Their house was on fire. I can only imagine what was going through Dad's head when he heard that news. The plan for that morning was for Mom to be at home with their youngest grandchild (my then 17-month-old son) that morning. As far as Dad knew, they were there, in a burning house. He called Mom's cell phone. My dad, like many men, is not known for showing his emotions. He's the kind of guy who has told his wife, "I told you when we got married that I love you. If it changes, I'll let you know." Yet I can't picture him that day without tears in his eyes when he heard Mom's voice. Her plans had changed that morning; not only was she not at home, she did not have my son with her. My parents met at their house and watched helplessly as flames tore through the roof. The firemen say the house probably only burned for about 30 or 40 minutes. But that was all that the flames needed to destroy nearly everything they owned. Somehow, Mom was able to joke about her grandkids warning her that if she lit all the candles on her birthday cake, she might start a fire. Dad said, "It's only stuff. We can replace that."

 

For richer, for poorer. The "poorer" part is something that we lived with for most of the time that I was growing up. Mom worked part-time, when she was able. For a while, Dad was laid off and working various odd jobs to support our family. There were a lot of struggles, but Mom and Dad got us through it. "Richer" can happen in a lot of ways. No matter what finances looked like, Mom and Dad let us know that we were rich in family and in love. Recently, the word has taken on a different meaning for my parents. Dad grew up on a farm in Washtenaw County, Michigan. After his mother passed away in 2001, the farm sat empty. One of my sisters lived there for a while, but it was never the same. Our family gathered at the farm on November 5, 2004, the day after my youngest sister got married, to watch as various fire departments in the area used the old house for a training exercise. We were all pretty emotional as the house burned slowly to the ground. That left a 70-acre farm that Dad and his brother rented out to local farmers. I'm sure it was a hard decision for them, but they put the land on the market. It sold in early 2008. The sale didn't make my parents millionaires, but it did give them enough money to be comfortable.

 

In sickness and in health. My parents have faced their own fair share of sickness. Or maybe they have faced more than their own share. Heart attack, bouts of depression, diverticulitis, knee replacement. Possibly the biggest threat that illness has made on their marriage came before they had been married for even ten years. Mom was diagnosed with cancer in 1982. I was six, and my memories of that are very hazy at best. I know that Mom was gone for a long time. My sisters said she had a tumor in her hip, but I didn't equate that to cancer in my young mind. All I understood was that something was growing in her hip that shouldn't be and that her doctors were mean, keeping her away from her family. Years later, I learned more of what happened back then. The type of cancer she had was very rare and very deadly. Her doctors told her she might not live through the surgery to remove the tumor. If she did live, she would lose her leg. If she didn't lose her leg, she would never walk again. She lived through it and though she has quite a limp she can walk. She survived and so did their marriage.

 

Mom and Dad have been a great example of love and marriage to me and my sisters. No, they are not perfect. No one is. But I think I was pretty lucky to be born into their family. No, it's not luck. It's a blessing. God knew exactly what kind of parents I would need, and He made sure to put me into their family. I'm happy to have them in my life.

 

I love you, Mommy and Daddy.

Why Love?

Why do you love your husband?

After a great day nine of the Love Dare, I opened the book to find this question. How is a girl supposed to answer that?

 

There is the physical reason: He is HOT!

 

There is the sentimental reason: He has been in my life since I was 18. How can I not love him?

 

There is the sarcastic reason: Someone has to do it!

 

I can list the things that I love about him—his sense of humor (most of the time I love it, anyway!), his beautiful blue eyes, his willingness to work at a crappy job to support our family, the way he takes care of me when I am not feeling well, his love for our children. But that's all they are—just things. If he wasn't funny, never had his eyes open, quit his job, stop taking care of me and ignored our kids, would I still love him? I don't think I would want to love him then.

And I think that is what it comes down to. I want—truly, madly, deeply WANT—to love my husband. Life is interesting with him. Sure, there are moments when he drives me absolutely insane! There have been times when I have struggled to find the reasons why I even like him. But even then, I have loved him.

 

We started dating in high school. Broke up for two years while I figured some stuff out about who I am. I dated others in that time, but it was my husband that I thought about. He is the one that I missed being near. His hand is the one I wanted to hold. His lips are the ones I wanted to kiss. No one else has ever made me feel the excitement that he does. Facing life without him…. It's not something I wanted to do 13 years ago, and it is not something I even want to think about doing now.

 

I know I don't always show him that love. Sometimes, I really take him for granted. That is why I started out on this journey through The Love Dare; I want to know how to love him better, how to show him love, and how to make his life as wonderful as he has made mine.

 

Yesterday, I continued with the loving greeting toward him. I tried to smile every time he walked into the room. The Dare was to do one unexpected thing to show my love for him. I did a few! I did the laundry (which is a chore he normally does because I just can't stand it!) and I filled his truck up with gas. When I woke up in the night unable to sleep, I put my arms around him and prayed for him. Of course, I also said the words "I love you" to him throughout the day. But I made sure that this time it was more than just words. I wanted him to see my love in action.

Beginning Day Nine

Tomorrow I will write more about how this day has impacted our marriage, but I wanted to say how excited I am that I have started on the Dare today. Even better—I started on it before I even read it!

 

Today's Love Dare deals with how I greet my husband. The challenge is to greet him with joy and love every time I see him. In a way, I could see how this would be hard. He is not feeling well today and didn't go to work. I don't know how it works in your house, but I know that around here it is harder to get a lot of cleaning done when my husband and my kids are home. The boys are here because of Christmas vacation. Our plan was to go through some clothes and toys, packing away all the summer stuff that was missed and put aside anything that can be sold in a yard sale this spring. But with my hubby being home, I don't know how well that will work out. He has a different idea of what "clean" is than I do! (He was raised by a complete neat freak. No joke—after her strokes, my mother-in-law didn't always know who I was or who her kids were, but by golly she knew if her doilies and knickknacks were moved!) He doesn't really believe that hanging onto anything is a good idea. The stuff that I put aside for a yard sale he likely will say can go in the trash or out to the Goodwill. My first thought when I realized he was not working today was, "Great. I'll never get done with what I need to do."

 

That isn't how I greeted him, though. He is still sleeping, and he doesn't know that I am feeling a little frustrated that my plans may not pan out the way I had hoped. What did I do? I rolled over, put my arms around him, and prayed for his healing. I know he heard me, because he patted my hand and said thank you.

 

Now, to see if I can keep up the "pleasant" greetings with him all throughout the day.

Day Eight of The Love Dare

Determine to become your spouse's biggest fan…share with your spouse how glad you are about a success he or she recently enjoyed.

OK, so I don't know if this counts, really, as a "recent" success, but it was the first success that came to mind. In June, 2008, my husband graduated from Baker College with a BA in marketing. Tonight, I told him how I proud I am that he did that. After all, he was working full-time and helping me care for our three children as he went to school. He had to make a lot of sacrifices to finish college, and it took him a lot longer than he had planned. But he did it! That is an awesome accomplishment.

Along with the accomplishments, my husband had to deal with some frustrations and resentment. The frustrations came from himself and to some extent from me.

The resentment? That was all me.

We graduated from high school in 1994 (yikes, did I just admit my age?). In June 1998, he graduated from Jackson Community College with an associate degree. His mother and I were in the audience, watching him receive the degree, and cheering loudly for him. Three months later, his mother suffered the first in a series of strokes. He took the fall semester off to take care of her. Working full-time, looking after his younger brothers and sister, and traveling to visit his mother (at one point, she was in a rehab facility nearly 90 minutes away from home) took up too much time. He couldn't concentrate on school at the same time. And since he was suddenly the only one to provide financial support for his little sister and 3 younger brothers, quitting his job or cutting back on his hours was out of the question. He said he was going to just give up on school all together so he could bring his mother home to recover. I convinced him not to do that. Instead, I gave up a full-time job and moved into his mother's home. He was closer to finishing school than I was, and I didn't want him to give up on his education. His mother was very proud of her college graduate son, and I hoped that pride would help her continue to get better.

That is where the resentment began. We were not yet married, yet I gave up everything to help out his family. In return, he was supposed to finish college and find a good job to support the family that we planned to start. Instead, he worked at Burger King and put school on hold. He worked long hours as an assistant store manager in a store 30 minutes from our home. Sometimes, my needs and plans we made together were pushed aside so that he could work more—if the store manager needed his help, he took off to give it. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought he was having an affair with her. In fact, if you read my journals from that time, you would see how much I wondered about their relationship. I never thought it was a sexual relationship; the manager was, after all, old enough to be his mother. But I often felt like she mattered to him more than I did, like her wants and needs were more important than mine. There were times when I wondered if we would even get married. I was afraid that she would need him to work on our wedding day and he would take off.

Shortly before our second child was born in 2003, I decided that I would go back to school. One of us needed to finish, right? Things were going well with that, until a miscarriage in 2005. I fell apart, failed my classes that term, and completely gave up. My husband, though, had decided if I could finish school, so could he. And the miscarriage didn't stop him. That sure added to the resentment. Even though he was only in school part-time, he was still in school. I was spiraling into depression, struggling to keep things together in front of our kids and just get through a day without hurting myself. He was working outside the home full-time and doing school work inside the home part-time. When he was here, I was still the one "parenting" the boys while he closed himself up in a room to do his school work.

Even the day of his graduation, I felt like I had made a lot of sacrifices for him to get through school. But it would all be worth it when he started to use that degree and had a better job, right? That didn't happen. Not that I blame him for it. The economy in Michigan was pretty bad before the rest of the country started to have problems. He has kept his factory job because of the benefits. If he could find a job in marketing that came with the same pay and a comparable benefit package, he would likely take it.

You might not be able to tell from what I have written here. To me, this sounds like a lot of complaining and griping. But I really am proud of my husband. I've moved past the resentment stage. Today I feel bad for it. He worked hard to better himself and try to provide a better life for our family. His college degree is just one thing that he has done to show his love for me and our children. I appreciate all the hard work that he put into it and hope that someday I can repay him for it.

Day Seven and an Apology

Please forgive me for not posting yesterday. It is my intention to blog everyday about my Love Dare experience. Life just got in the way yesterday.

Actually, it is more accurate to say that death got in the way yesterday.

A very close family friend—she may as well be family as her two older brothers married my two younger sisters—received devastating news at a routine prenatal appointment Wednesday. Her baby—a boy just five weeks shy of his due date—had no heartbeat. She and her husband were shocked. They had no indication that anything at all was wrong. Little Logan had been moving normally in the morning. By her afternoon appointment, there was no heartbeat and the ultrasound showed no movement. Due to a lack of beds, she was sent home. Yesterday, her husband, parents, and in-laws gathered around her in the labor and delivery room as she gave birth to a 4 pound, 3 ounce, beautiful baby boy. I'm told that he had lots of dark hair with blonde tips on the end, and that he looked like his mother. This little family, as expected, is devastated. She will be released from the hospital today, but instead of planning out his nursery, she has to plan a funeral for her first child.

It's been hard to concentrate on much of anything other than this little family. Somehow, I did get through my Day Seven Dare, though. I haven't even looked at Day Eight yet. I hope to be able to do that when my 2-year-old is napping.

For Day Seven, I had to make two lists—one of my husband's good qualities and one of his bad. At first, I thought it was going to be harder to make the good list than the bad. To my surprise, it wasn't. I struggled to come up with negatives. As I have gone along this Dare, I have started to focus on all of the positive attributes that helped me fall in love with him in the first place. Even for this Dare, it was hard to come up with much negative to say about him. The negative list I did come up with is actually smaller than the list of positives. That is a miracle!

I have decided that I will not share those lists here. I will share the second part of the Dare. The directions say to pick a positive attribute and thank your spouse for it. That was easy. Well, sort of! It wasn't as easy to come up with just one thing to thank him for. I thanked him for working so hard for our family. And I thanked him for being so caring. This baby loss has brought to mind thoughts of our miscarriage. He called me from work yesterday to make sure I was holding up all right. I really appreciate his thoughtfulness.

Not Sure About Day Six

I don't know really what to say about Day Six of the Love Dare. It has been the most confusing day of the Dare so far. "Choose today to react to tough circumstances in your marriage in loving ways instead of with irritation. Begin by making a list below of areas where you need to add margin to your schedule. Then list any wrong motivations that you need to release from your life." I am not even sure I know what that means. I had to read the lesson a few times over. Because of that, I took two days to complete this Dare instead of just one.

The best that I can come up with is that "adding margin" means "taking a break". I looked at it like a piece of paper. There are margins all around the page, white spaces that give the eye a little rest when reading. So I am thinking that to "add margin" to my schedule means I need to build in some break times. That makes sense, especially when it comes to my writing. When I get into a project, I don't like to stop. I don't even like to stop long enough to make dinner for my family. There are times when my writing project becomes more important than anything else in my life. That is definitely something that I need to work on.

My writing is also a place where I know I have "wrong motivations." I'll admit—I have this dream in my head of being as famous for my writing as Karen Kingsbury or J.K. Rowling. It would be wonderful to know that my books, stories, and characters are as well known and well loved as Karen's. And to have the huge financial success that J.K. has had…wow! Yet I know that allowing the fame and fortune to be my motivation would be wrong. If God intends me to have that kind of fame and fortune, He will lead it my way. If I chase after it…. Well, I just don't see much good coming from that.

Instead, I need to focus on why I write in the first place. The big reason—I write because I cannot NOT write. The characters and the stories grow in my head until there is just no room for anything. I have to get them out on paper (or computer screen!).

The even bigger reason I write is why I think those stories get into my head—to reach others for Christ. I don't know if you have read any of my work, but my characters are far from perfect. In my first novel, Joel turned away from a calling to preach and has ignored God for 15 years. In my second, Laura is a single mother, still in love with her 9-year-old daughter's father, a man she never married. In the third, I have characters dealing with rape, drugs, pornography, and adultery. In my not-yet-released fourth novel, the characters are dealing with a 20-year-old crime and the implications that event has on them now. None of these people have perfect lives. Even the ones who have a deep-rooted faith in Christ find themselves doubting Him at times. I believe that God has given me these stories and characters to show the need for a Savior—if we were perfect, Christ would not have needed to give His life for us.

I am not sure that this really relates back to the Love Dare. Then again, I guess it does. The Love Dare is about learning to love your mate and to show that love in and even deeper, stronger, more meaningful way. My writing career can benefit our marriage by taking some of the financial pressures off of my husband. He works hard for our family at a job he doesn't like, a job that doesn't really challenge him intellectually. Keeping my motivation—to reach others for Christ, as I feel He is asking me to do—in front of me as I write, maybe I will be able to bring in enough money to ease that burden on him. Maybe then he would be able to say no some overtime and be able to spend more time at home with his family.

Whether I really got the point of this Dare or not, I don't know. But this is the best that I could do with it.

On to Day Seven. I need to make one list of positives about my husband and one list of negatives. This could get interesting….

A Renewed Commitment

In 2005, my husband and I began a friendship with a couple who was new to our church. They were close to our age, had children about the same ages as ours, and had been married for as long as we had. Best of all, they shared our Christian faith, something that not many of our friends at the time did.

My husband and I were married in January 2000. This couple said I Do in May 2000. As we got to know each other more, I discovered that she had a lot of regrets about her wedding. Oh, not so much about the marriage—she was happy and as in love with him as the day they exchanged vows. But she felt like she had been cheated out of the wedding she wanted. Her mother-in-law tends to be—how can I put this nicely?—somewhat domineering. This was her only son, her only child, getting married, and she had a picture in her mind of what his wedding should be. He was not good at standing up to Mom, no matter what the woman he loved said, so instead of this bride getting the wedding of her dreams, she got the wedding of her mother-in-law's dreams. This led to a lot of issues with her husband and a lot of resentment toward her mother-in-law. I suggested to my friend that she might want to consider renewing her wedding vows. That way, she could plan out the wedding she always wanted and maybe move past some of her regrets. She liked the idea, but she didn't want to do it alone. She talked to her husband and I talked to mine, and we agreed to renew our vows together in March, 2010—six weeks before her 10^th anniversary and 6 weeks after mine.

The plan sort of fizzled out. The other couple began to attend a new church, and we sort of drifted apart. Still, my husband and I thought that renewing our vows was a perfect way to celebrate our 10^th anniversary. At one point, we even reserved our church for the day after our anniversary. But that was all of the planning that we did. This past Sunday, the pastor asked my husband if we still wanted to do it. Hubby came home and asked me, and I said yes. Even though things are not perfect right now (as if any marriage ever is truly perfect), I think that renewing our vows is a good idea. It will affirm to each of us that we are with the person God wants us to be with, and it reaffirms our commitment to make this marriage last.

It will not be a huge lavish party. We are going to invite a few friends and our family to watch the ceremony and share cake and punch with us afterward. I am really looking forward to it, and I thank God for giving us the chance to do this and to spend our lives together.