In This for Life

I don’t remember the argument. I don’t remember what set my heart on edge against my own husband. Isn’t it funny how in the moment, those things feel like the biggest things but now, weeks, months later, I don’t remember the actions, words, feelings that had me seething with anger and emotion. 

But I remember the teary phone call I made while I drove to work. We each had gone our separate ways. He dropped our girl off at middle school. I drove the winding roads with our three-year-old to my mother’s house where I’d leave him for the day while I worked. I hated the lack of peace between us and yet I was still unreasonably upset. I called him without a plan. Without a resolution but really just wanted him to know I was sorry for making the morning so difficult. 

I cried, knowing I was still upset, knowing we didn’t have an answer yet. “I’m so sorry,” I sniffled while the cornfield passed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. We’ll figure it out, right? We’ll be ok?”

He was calm, steady. “Of course babe,” he said from the other end of the line. “We have the rest of our lives to figure this out. I’m not going anywhere. I’m in this for life.” 

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I’m in my second marriage, as you well know. The first erupted and ended badly. Fire and ice, pain and betrayal, sin and brokenness. All of the things that steal from a home instead of sustain it. And as much as I hate to admit it, even 5 years into my marriage to my husband now, I still fear that one day I will do the thing that sends him running. I will say something, complain about something, look a certain way, not fit into a certain size, and he’ll shrug his shoulders and murmur something that I’ve heard before.

“I never loved you. I don’t even remember promising to stay with you at that altar. I have no interest in being your husband anymore. I want out.”

I know that healing never follows the same timeline as pain. We all know one moment of heartbreak doesn’t take one moment of healing. One brief action of devastating abuse is not undone in a few minutes of peace. The emotional car wreck of a divorce obviously still lingers in my peripheral now, 10 years later. Maybe that makes me weak, or too driven by emotion. Whatever it is, I know the Lord isn’t finished overturning those rocks and gently leaning in to fix and restore the shattered edges of who I am. 

He does it in moments when the wind is blowing the fresh snow across the country roads and my husband says “We have the rest of our lives.” I think of us, Lord willing, 80, 90 years old, slightly hunched and still figuring it out. That would be a tremendous gift of grace. 

Remarriage doesn’t solve the pain of divorce. There is no person who can cure or heal the after-effects of such covenantal failure. Except for Christ, who no doubt was with me when I woke every morning with my heart on edge and said words to Him that were messy and broken. When I cried, “Lord, I’m trying to figure this out” and he’d remind me that He was in this for life. That nothing could take me out of his hand. That he would keep me.

So when my husband said these words, my heart remembered what faithfulness sounds like and it wasn’t just romance or empty promises but the echoes of the kind of love that doesn’t falter under pressure but rises up under it. We have the rest of our lives and somehow that makes marriage the easiest thing. It doesn’t scare me and it doesn’t make me uneasy. I know we’re still babies in this thing. Five years of marriage means we’re just kids and we haven’t been fully tested by the gauntlet of life, but something about the even keel nature of commitment has my heart at rest. Marriage is no ball and chain but the deep breath of patience and long-suffering that says by God’s grace, we’ll figure it out. We won’t grin and bear it. We’ll cry and apologize and try again. We won’t claim to have found any secrets or methods that are foolproof. We’ll walk the long road to our final home until one day one of us says goodbye to other, knowing we had many country roads, many frustrating phone calls, a lot of imperfect apologies, and that we were in it for life.