New Beginnings, Love & Happiness
New Beginnings, Love & Happiness
New Beginnings:
It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. So long that opening myself up to be vulnerable to the online community feels strange, and scary. I like being this kind of uncomfortable - it is always terrifying to show any part of ourselves to anyone. Our hearts and our souls are so sacred. What happens if we are rejected? What happens if they disagree? What happens WHEN they don’t love me?
But the risk - it’s worth it.
I find myself constantly having moments of sincere thought that I feel the need to share, not with the intentions of changing anyones mind, but with the intention of not feeling alone. Community is such an important avenue of life, one that I would personally say I take advantage of on a daily basis.
So here I go. Please bare with me as I stretch my newborn wobbly bloggy legs out again. This will be all over the place.
Love & Happiness:
Since becoming engaged I not only have personally learned a lot about love, but I’ve also been told a lot about love both directly and indirectly. The ‘advice’ and ‘love lessons’ I’ve collected over the past 4 months span from all types of thoughts and opinions, coming from sources like co-workers, social media and even advice blogs online.
But one in particular shook me to my core. “If you don’t wake up in pure bliss and happiness every morning of your marriage you need to get out of the relationship.”
I am deeply saddened by the view of love and marriage in today’s society.
Let me stop here and say this: My views on love and marriage are based on my personal relationship with Jesus; albeit how weak or strong that may be at any time. I am a Christian; a bad Christian at that. I drink, I cuss, I kill people in my thoughts every other day (the bible says that’s just as bad as actually killing them - oops) - but throughout the journey I’m trying to be a better person and a little more like Jesus every day. (Lord help me).
So if you are not a Christian, this blog may not click for you - and that’s okay.
The world tells us that being selfish is okay. That looking out for your own heart and happiness is the best way.
The world tells you that you have to feel ‘in love’ every bit of the way and the day you stop feeling it is the day you find your exit out of the relationship.
I hate this.
This goes against everything that I believe love to be.
Love is absolutely a choice.
Ya’ll, being engaged is HARD. We continue to learn new things about each other EVERY DAY. Not all of the new things are good. Some are really bad - after all we are both humans - completely imperfect and fleshly driven. But through it all, one thing remains true. We WANT to be with each other; today, tomorrow and every day for the rest of our lives. We choose every day to forgive each other, show mercy and grace to one another and to leave our selves behind in pursuit of one another.
Sure the days where everything is peachy keen, we are happy. The goo-goo eyes are poppin’ outta our skulls and we have stupid grins glued to our faces all day.
But the days when love is hard - those days, tear soaked cheeks, losing our voices from sharing our hearts and our ears aching from listening to those hearts - Those days are the days that we discover joy and so so so much freedom. Those are the days that we feel the big L, Love. And I gotta tell ya, the big L Love is so much more powerful of a feeling than the ‘in love’ feeling. It’s a precious, genuine, painful, comforting moment of release. At the end of those days I sit on my bed and I think to myself “I SUCK! I’m a terrible person! I’m going to totally fail at this wife thing! …..But he loves me still. STILL! Really!? I can’t believe he still loves me, thank you GOD because I know that I don’t deserve this.”
The dirty truth is - we all deserve bad stuff. We live in sinful world, whether we chose to be born into it or not. It’s the stuff we don’t deserve that gives us freedom. Freedom to completely be ourselves without fear of rejection or embarrassment. Freedom to completely be known and to know; to love and to be loved in it’s purest form.
Sure, waking up in pure bliss and happiness is all daisy’s and roses… but waking up with an aching, raw, big L love in my heart and tear-filled joy in my eyes beats that any day.
Relationships, most importantly marriages, take intense work. I know this because I am approaching it rapidly and already feeling the heat. Just like anything else in life, it were easy it wouldn’t be worth having at all.
I find that from the most intense pain comes the most immense growth. I think that growth is the most important thing in life. To grow with one another, to grow with God, to grow the earth. The opposite of growth is death. The moment you stop growing you start dying.
So yeah, okay. In 2 months I’m getting married, and I know I won’t be the trophy wife and I’ll probably screw up and make poor decisions and so on, but this much is true:
I’ll grow trying.