The Best is Always Yet to Come

Six months ago I vowed to honor, to love, and to do life until death with my best friend.  Looking back, I can honestly say I didn’t know all the subcategories that go unmentioned when making these vows.

These subcategories include juggling class loads together, crunching out research papers, embracing job changes, working seventy hour weeks, facilitating church functions, going shopping for the sake of spending time together, anticipating each other’s needs, coordinating wedding plans, taking mini vacations, laboring through Clinical Pastoral Education, traveling for work, preparing lesson plans, and saying goodbye to old friends. 

More subcategories include battling illnesses, ulcers and the strep throats.  Fighting over who makes the bed, folds the laundry, or takes out the trash.  In reality, we’ve vowed to laugh over how much I don’t know about cooking (and maybe life in general).  We’ve vowed to play countless games of Sequence and Banana-grams.

We’ve vowed to honor each other even when the situations don’t call for it and to remain emotionally available – even when it’s hard.  We’ve vowed to battle for personal, alone time.  We’ve vowed to go on runs together even at a pace slower than I’d like.  We’ve vowed to talk about doing more with friends – even when we can’t seem to find the time.  We’ve vowed to cry together, play Nintendo Wii, and laugh at each other hoola-hooping.  In reality, we’ve vowed to learn that stealing the covers and waking the other up every single night is equally as rude as watching SportsCenter while the other is sleeping. 

And these vows help us find a rhythm.  We now eat dinner and talk about our day as well as learn how the other needs to be heard.  And through all of this, we learn that the value and intensity of the vows made six months ago run far deeper than just heavy-handed words.

Making these vows was easy – living these vows out today carries much more weight.  But despite the hidden anecdotes – I’d make them over and over again!

I don’t make these vows because life is currently easy or love is saturating.  I don’t make them because visions of sugarplums dance in my head.  On the contrary, I make these vows because I believe in the words Noelle told me the night of our wedding – “My hope for our marriage is that the best is always yet to come.”     

Now six months in – I can honestly say I’d never have guessed it to be such a fun dance.  There are times we do marriage quite well – it’s smooth, calculated, and looks effortless.  There are other times that appear much more blocky, choppy, and uncoordinated.  There are fast parts, slow parts, dips, twirls, and mistakes.  But all along the music keeps playing and we keep dancing knowing that as long as we keep vowing to hold on to each other the best is always yet to come. 

Happy six months Noelle.  I love you!

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