Our Vows 4~14~12

Jenny, I promise this day to love you for the rest of my life. I have been given very specific instructions on this, and you need to know what those are so you can count on them every morning when you awake,every moment of the day. I am instructed to love you as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. So I promise to submit my life to you. I am to love you as I love my own body. I am also instructed to consider who you are in my love for you. I am to know you, to understand what you need, to apprehend your very nature for the sole purpose of loving you. I believe that God has given me the nature to do this. And so I will.

I will seek out your heart. I will provide everything I am able for you to live in your beauty. I will listen to your fears and respond with protection. I will be your friend and enjoy an intimacy that could only be designed by God. And I will love your body with a passion that grows deeper as the years pass. I will love you for as long as we both shall live.



Today, Peter, I take you to be my husband. I promise to grow with you everyday of our journey, to walk with you through each challenge, and to cherish the chance to know the complexities of you.

I promise to love you as the man God made you to be, trusting you, choosing you, showing you by my actions, words, and the adoration in my eyes how essential you are to my heart.

I promise to honor the father you are, recognizing the beauty and importance of your relationship with your children, and supporting and loving them as my own.

I promise to share the beauty of the present moment with you, being open and honest in everything, sharing laughter and tears, joys and heartaches, ever grateful to have you by my side.

I promise to take the healing power that God pours on me everyday, to shower that beautiful grace on you, to experience the deepest intimacy with you in prayer, in worship, in everyday moments, and in loving you with all that I am.

I promise to give you all of me: my vulnerability, my strength, my handsiness, my friendship, the broken pieces of me and the healed, to faithfully love you and you alone for the rest of my life.

Beautiful

This picture brings me joy, peaceful thoughts, waves of gratitude. I have dear friends who have spent countless hours working to create a place of beauty to celebrate our wedding day. Friends who love me enough to dedicate resources and precious time working on their property. I look at their incredible generosity and the exquisite backdrop for our ceremony, and I am simply overwhelmed.

I have traveled over some treacherous paths. I’ve been swallowed up in hopelessness and weariness. When I think of some of the scenes from my past: places where joy was expected, beauty was deserved, peace was worked towards… but places where betrayals, abandonments, and shame stamped out every potential bloom, my heart can’t believe where I stand today. The gloriousness God has surrounded me with! The
view He has provided in front of me!

In a way, the darkness seems even blacker, accentuated by the light of this moment. The loneliness pierces me deeper, where love has opened starving places in me and filled that hunger. When I stare at the awesomeness of this masterpiece, composed for my wedding day, the ugliness of my past stands up. I stare at it, unable to stop shaking my head, completely in awe of where I was, and where I am now.

Last Tuesday, March 27th, I stepped off a curb wrong and rolled my ankle bad enough to create quite a severe break. I’ve spent a week nursing it in bed, being nursed by my fiance and my kids. And a lot of the time crying over ease lost, difficulties created, and disappointments made. Tomorrow, April 3rd, I will head into surgery, letting the doctor put a plate and some screws in my ankle, and spend a few days sleeping off the anesthetic and drugs. Anxiety causes more tears than the pain does. I’m sure there will be more.

And yet, I sit here after four hours at the doctor’s office, making decisions, and prepping for surgery. I sit here exhausted and afraid. Then my eyes wander over to this snapshot sent to me yesterday. One of twenty something sent to me to show where a gorgeous planter was placed, and how the lights on the barn look at night, the little swing hanging from the giant oak, the red tulips in bloom circling it’s base, the grass lush and green inviting my bare toes. And I am filled beyond reason with peace and gratitude and a joy I cannot express.

No denying this broken ankle is a pain in the ass. But it’s a tiny bump on a well-worn road. I am absolutely thrilled to hear the tender prayers of people who love me, feel the gentle touch of their support, grasp the beautiful words sent to encourage, and thrive in circumstances out of my control, knowing that God brought me here. I once felt so alone, so weak, so unwanted. I’ll take the broken ankle and the surgery. And I’ll hobble over on my crutches, sit gingerly in my ivory gown on this little swing, and praise God for the union with the man I love, a man who utterly adores me, and for the strength of friends who provided such a sacred space.