A decade.

Ten years. A decade.

One decade ago, a girl married a blue eyed, quick witted boy with a smile that lit up any room he walked into. If I’m being honest, he was also a little cocky and had a smart mouth. Ha.

Over the past ten years, we have grown. Our family has grown, our lives have changed and there have been adventures. We’ve grown spiritually, we’ve grown emotionally and we’ve put on a few pounds. The recovering people pleaser in me would tell you that the past decade has been full of sunshine and rainbows…that each day has been magnificent because I married Prince Charming. People Pleaser me would have told you that our life has been picturesque and as beautiful on the inside as it appeared on the outside. That would be a lie though.

The reality is that the past ten years have been hard. They have been a true test of what it means to step outside ourselves and truly love each other unconditionally. There have been times when I didn’t want to choose J and I’m certain there have been times where he’s felt the same way. Despite our temporary feelings, we’ve chosen to lean into the commitment we made to God that we’d love each other until He took us home to be with Him.

Truth is, even when I don’t want to choose to walk through the truly hard parts of loving another imperfect person, I’m reminded of how gently, how perfectly, how faithfully my Father loves me in all my dysfunction and it’s hard not to choose to love.

Please hear me when I say we absolutely have a beautiful life. It’s a life that I dreamed of as a little girl. A life where I married my best friend and we had beautiful babies (because our babies are totally gorgeous) and we walked beside each other through really hard things.

When I was a little girl, hard things looked like a pet dying or deciding where to eat dinner. Hehe. Grown up me has learned about really hard things and that they have little to do with a pet who dies or where to eat dinner at night. Hard things look like losing a job, moving a family across the country, fostering and then letting your fosters go, miscarriage and relationships with parents-fully leaving and cleaving, walking through finances and not always agreeing and parenting. Goodness, parenting is hard. Hard things are inevitable and choosing to love through the hard things is equally hard.

At the end of the day, though, I
choose to love J because despite all my faults, all my imperfectness (is that a word?), despite my moodiness and my extreme fight response when I’m backed into a corner-he chooses me. I still choose to love him because I get to be the person God created me to be which is definitely NOT the girl he married ten years ago. He chose to stay and walk beside me through two really hard years of intense therapy where I fell apart and had to learn to be a person very different from the people pleaser he married. I choose him every day because he is my person. He is my soft place to land and he is stronger now than I ever dreamed he’d be ten years ago. I choose him because I get a choice. The boy who stood in front of me ten years ago and vowed forever is gone and there’s now a man who chooses me even when things are hard.

When we said I do, our pastor used Joshua 1:9 as the main verse for our wedding. I didn’t realize then how absolute that scripture would become in our marriage. Marriage takes strength and courage. It means falling down and getting back up, together. It means leaning into the gift God gave you in one another and still maintaining your own identity. Whew. That’s a hard one. It means not losing yourself and yet, submitting yourselves to one another.

So, here’s to ten years with a handsome blue-eyed boy who turned into an amazing blue-eyed man. Here’s to adventures both big and small, to never becoming complacent and to always seeking Him in all we do. Here’s to laughter, love and hard things. Because we can do hard things.

“Two are better than one…if either falls down, one can help him up.” -Ecclesiastes 4:9