No 7 Year Itch Here!

May 24, 2003


By the numbers for Tim and I in our marriage:
24 - of May 2003 was our wedding day.
7 - number of years we've been married
4 - pregnancies
3 - births
4 - times we've moved
2 - dogs we've owned
4 - vehicles we've owned
2 - houses we've owned (or pay mortgage on, I guess technically the bank owns it still)
2 - passing of grandparents (one mine, one his)
1 - passing of great-grandparent (mine)
2 - marriage conferences
2 - counselors I've seen (one after the miscarriage, one for dealing with a past issue)
6 - number of years Tim has been painting
220,000+ - miles on each of our vans (there are two)
4 - times we've flown places together.
6 - numbers of weddings in which one of us has served in the bridal party

There have been countless arguments, vacations, friends, life changes, weddings attended, dates and days of joy.

When you're a little girl, you dream of growing up and getting married to a prince and living in a castle.
Then you grow older and find out princes are hard to come by in America, so you settle for the dream of marrying a doctor, being rich and living in a big and beautiful home.
Then you find the man of your dreams and realize he wants to be a youth pastor.
Then he spends some time being a painter after you've been married for not even a year. He interns at a church and finds out it is not what he wants to do. But he loves painting and home restoration. He quits college after four and a half years of studying youth ministry and you settle into an even lower income than a youth pastor.
I realized along the way that my childhood dreams did not come true. My teenage dreams did not come true. Even the dreams I had as a young married woman did not come true.
Yet I would have missed out on so much if they had. So many lessons learned along the way that could only be learned by going through the circumstances we did. Our marriage being strengthened in ways that would not have been possible if things went the way I dreamed them to.
If things went the way we planned them to we would have missed out on Caleb.
We would have missed out on moving over to the lakeshore which would have missed many friendships.
We would still be weak and lukewarm Christians, not ever taking leaps of faith or strengthening our trust in the Lord.
I have loved every minute of our 7 years together because it has brought us to where we are now. I know we still have a lot of growing to continue to do, too, and I wouldn't want to do it with anyone but Tim.

Early May 2010