As Jo and I prepared to wed, and were neck deep in a period
of premarital counseling there seemed to be no end to the advice that people
gave to us. “Marriage is the greatest journey of your lives,” “oh you’ll have
hard days,” [but] “just keep being open about your expectations,” and the
like. And though we cared to improve our
chances and welcomed most of the
advice, much of it fell on deaf ears all the same. Almost that it was a vocabulary we couldn’t
yet fully understand.
We were caught up in the euphoria; drenched in optimism and
so preoccupied with the last minute details of the ceremony that we had little
time to really give all what seemed distant concerns a second thought. As Will Rogers put it so aptly, “There are
three kinds of men. The one that learns
by reading, [the] few who learn by observation, [while] the rest of them have
to pee on the electric fence for themselves.” It didn’t matter how prepared we
thought we were - saying “I do” was about to give us the greatest jolt of our
lives. So much so that at times, each of
us would look back and think, “wow, life before marriage was so easy.”
And so it has been with kids.
Having been Everly’s parents for the last 17 months, and
having delighted in her the entire
time, we nevertheless looked back on our year or so of marriage pre-kids with
this “wow, just being married was amazing; we were so free…” Yet no amount of advice or encouragement as we expected our
first child could have prepared us for it.
Again we learned by doing, for the common language we were straining to
understand wouldn’t come without experience.
We had to take the leap ourselves.
Perhaps much of life is this way, surprising us with
busyness or stress or consuming our time with things we never imagined would. If that’s more normal than I realize, then I
only hope that the backwards-looking, “life was
so _______” moments won’t be. Perhaps
the only common language we should hope for is “depend on God, and see what he
does.” Though change is certain, he
longs to surprise us with mercy that is new with the dawn.
And dawn never ceases to come.
