Happy 5th to us!

I can’t believe it has been five years since we have been married, but at the same time, I can’t remember how it felt to not have Devin in my life.  The past five years have been beautifully hard; we’ve learned and learned and learned.

We have moved cross country without knowing anyone.  We have had long distance marriage for months, dealt with extensive job traveling, and the closest we have lived to any family has been 6 hours away (at this point, it is 10 hours).  We have experienced the loss of a sibling and chronic pain.  We have experienced debt and have gotten out of it.  

We’ve had job promotions and changes, both of us beginning grad school together, and bringing home our first pet.  We bought a house that made us feel at home and laughed until we cried when we had simultaneous pest control, roof problems, and a leak my first week of grad school while Devin was traveling.  We have visited 25 states, crawled into the windows of abandoned homes in ghost towns, and walked around ponds that my great-great uncles dug out with mules and dynamite.

I could go on telling you about the things that this past 5 years has been full of, but I feel it would be undermining the most important thing we have actually learned.

We are far from perfect people, and we are two people with very different hobbies, interests, and ways of doing things.  I am a romantic who lives in a world of other meanings and my husband lives on the surface looking at systems of how things function.  We have different conflict and communication styles, grew up in vastly different parts of the country, but we share similar goals and values.  The most important being: our marriage works because we continuously work on forgiving, sacrificing and serving each other.

My testimony in God has become more tangible because I’ve seen how Devin extends mercy to me in my shortcomings and in that process, I have become better than what I was.  I have grown in ways I hoped I would, but likely would have lacked the confidence in pursuing by myself.

Happy 5th to us and a forever more to go!