Marriage, Monotony & Miracles

Today marks exactly one year since I rolled my pick-up truck off a mountain after it danced across some black ice. This week I broke a favorite bowl, and a glass candle holder as I knocked a shelf off the wall. Today I smashed my head in between our truck and its door. But despite my best efforts of discombobulation and clumsiness...Praise God, I'm alive... and neither of our vehicles are totaled at this given moment.

Marriage has been my new reality for nearly two months. There are many pauses yet when I'm still surprised that I do in fact, have a husband...And I'm dazed by the joy that he is, and the sweetness of living life with this servant fellow and friend. Normalcy is growing. And so life is settling, slowing.

In some ways, I feel like I have climbed a peak...and now I don't know what to do with the less strenuous downhill trek. Maybe I'm experiencing a combination of after-graduation dull drums and after-wedding la-de-dahs? A bit of death to my romanticized "Erin helps the world" high-school life-script?  There has been so much momentum in the past twenty-five years. Now that I don't have an intended trajectory, that life has just become life (as maybe it always should have been) I feel a bit disoriented. I am here in Glennallen for two more years. I was awarded partial loan forgiveness (!!) for another two year commitment at Cross Road. The what next question is not yet to be asked.

Dishes have to be done every day (or the pile seems to breed like rabbits). Laundry too seems to excel in its own version of mitosis.  My cat has yet to be trained to take out his dirty litter.  Work is often something that "just has to be done" and there are times at the end of the day when I don't feel my professional occupation and ministry of the day made a difference for humanity...or in God's kingdom.

Life's monotony and tedium is ever challenging. I know that sometimes life's biggest ministries are to friends and family. That sometimes the mountain before us is one of being diligently faithful...even in domestic chores. Sometimes I fear that my dreams for life supersede the lot God is unfolding. This is a lie. I can see that. But I've always been one to push, to want to live a dream of great endeavors. To rescue the orphan. To bring health care to the forgotten. To be an agent of healing in the face of crisis. Maybe I still will do these things (I pray so), but I've been called to embrace contentedness in my quiet season of average grown-up life. To love my husband well. To die to self and think on Jesus more, to practice prayer, to be intentional in being a good neighbor, to cultivate peace and spiritual discipline. These things will never change, even as other circumstances do.  It is a good season, a foundation season, but it is still hard in its own way (as most seasons are). In years down the road, I'm sure to want to return to this time and pace. And maybe my declaration that life is even slowing is presumptuous. For as my accident taught me, and my unanticipated marriage this year, who can guess what God is to unfold (and unfold quickly)?

Please pray with me and for me as I learn again and again the necessity of surrendering all of life, in all seasons, unto Jesus. The very thing I was learning and praying a year ago after my truck accident.

Please pray that I would learn to exchange anxiety for Christ's peace.

Life seems at times to fall through my fingers even when I'm making every effort to grip with all my strength. And why? Life is not my own to mold and manipulate. Pray that I'd yield to the Potter. Pray that I would learn to breathe the gift of life in each moment, monotonous or not. That each breath, each rise and fall of my chest, would be one of gratitude and worship, come what may. That alone, I have seen and argued on behalf of others, would be enough to make a mark on God's kingdom. And the miracle of it all, is... that as I learn to breathe, as I learn to love more intentionally in the mundane, as I learn to use gifted time wisely, as I learn to be joyful in all circumstances (even the average ones), as I learn again to wait on the Lord's story (not my own)...God's good grace is infused through each daily detail.