The Little Marriage That Could

On dry bones and the ridiculous audacity of hope.

An Anniversary We Celebrate

This weekend marks an anniversary we celebrate.

Although this year, I nearly forgot. I didn't creep toward the anniversary with the usual awareness of what was coming. This year, I nearly walked right past it.

A stark contrast to last year, the significance of ten years sent me into a spiral. Or maybe it was the unrelenting stress of my life at the time.

Nope, I barely remembered until Jon asked about my headspace toward him given this time of year.

Eleven years ago this weekend, our marriage blew apart.

And every year since, I have become a little more grateful that it did not stay that way.

So yes, we celebrate.

Not the adultery.
Not the devastation.
Not the worst days of our marriage.

We celebrate that they weren't the last days of our marriage.
And we celebrate the marriage that grew where the wasteland once was. Truly.

Because somehow the two people standing in the wreckage eleven years ago: angry, wounded, humiliated, exhausted, and so very far away from one another - kept going. One excruciating step at a time.

There were days I wasn't sure I wanted the marriage anymore.

There were days I'm pretty sure he wasn't sure either.

And yet, here we are.

Eleven years later.

Still married.

Still occasionally annoyed about the dishwasher.
Still capable of getting on one another's last available nerve.

I keep thinking - maybe flippantly - about The Little Engine That Could.

Which feels almost insulting at first.

Because there was nothing adorable about what happened to us.

Rebuilding a marriage after betrayal is brutal.

Forgiveness is brutal.

Trust does not magically reappear because somebody apologized.

You don't wake up one morning and discover that mercy has erased memory.

There were hard conversations.
Then the same hard conversations again and again and again.

There were triggers. Let's be honest, there still are triggers.
Triggers is a trigger word.
Setbacks.
Suspicion.
Anger.
Counseling.
Prayer.
Repentance.
Questions without satisfying answers.
Days of choosing each other followed by days when choosing each other felt like a terrible idea.

And maybe that's exactly why I keep coming back to that silly little train.

Because the mountain was the whole dang point.

The little engine looked at something bigger than itself and kept going anyway.

I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.

Maybe marriage needs some of that.

I mean the stubborn, holy perseverance required when two repentant, willing people look at the wreckage between them and decide:

Let's try again.
Let's make it through today.
Let's have this conversation without destroying each other.
Let's tell the truth.
Let's go to counseling.
Let's pray even though prayer feels weird right now.
Let's forgive this piece.
Let's rebuild this inch.
Let's climb this part of the mountain.

Sometimes, I think we imagine restoration as this enormous act of faith.

Ours looked much smaller.
It was a thousand tiny decisions not to quit.

But it was everything I had in me to make each tiny decision.

The Years the Locusts Ate

And somewhere in those tiny decisions, God began doing something I couldn't see yet.

In Joel, after years of devastation, God makes this extraordinary promise:

“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” ~Joel 2:25

I understand that verse differently now.

Restoration does not necessarily mean getting the old thing back.

I don't want our old marriage back.

That marriage was hurting.
Neglected.
Drifting.
Full of wounds we weren't tending and things we weren't saying.

God didn't take us backward.

He took the ruins and started building forward.
And He did it slowly enough that sometimes we didn't realize it was happening.

That is the strange thing about restoration.
While you're living it, it often just feels like work.

There were stretches of that mountain where neither of us had enough strength, tenderness, wisdom, patience, or even desire to pull the thing another inch.

God did not ask us to manufacture enough strength to resurrect something that felt dead.

He asked us to keep bringing Him the bones.

And little by little, breath returned.

But not all at once.

Which matters to me.

Because, all too often, I think we tell restoration stories too neatly.

We show people the other side of the mountain and forget to tell them how many times we stopped halfway up and thought, Nope. Absolutely not. Leave the train here.

We forget the ugly middle.

The middle where forgiveness has been offered but trust is still limping.

The middle where you're doing the right things and wondering when they will start feeling like anything.

The middle where sometimes we practiced the behaviors of marriage while having none of the emotions to accompany them. Vacant sex and dull dates and monotonous prayers because the feelings toward your spouse are dark and hateful.

The middle where obedience has to carry what emotion cannot.

And Then You Look Up

That's where marriages are rebuilt.

Not in the grand declaration.
In the next faithful thing.
And then the next one. And then another.

Until one day you look up.
Eleven years have passed.

The person who once felt impossibly far away is sitting beside you on the couch.
There is laughter in rooms that once held dry bones.
There are children and inside jokes and grocery lists and stupid arguments and ordinary Tuesdays.
There is tenderness where there was once contempt.
There is trust where there was terror.

There is life.
Not the same life.
Something rebuilt.
Something scarred. Something sacred.

Maybe that's what restoration looks like.
Not pretending the locusts never came.

Standing in a field that was once stripped bare and realizing something is growing there again.

And you realize: We made it over a mountain I was certain would bury us.

Except even now, I don't think the lesson is: I thought we could.

I think the lesson is: God did.

We just kept saying yes to the next mile.

The Little Marriage That Could wasn't particularly impressive while it was climbing.

It was beat-up and wheezing and dragging a ridiculous amount of baggage behind it.

But it kept moving.
And God kept restoring.

Eleven years ago, I could not see eleven years from there.
I couldn't even see tomorrow.

I certainly couldn't imagine that someday we would look at the anniversary of one of the worst moments of our lives and celebrate.

But we do.

Because Scripture gives me words now that I didn't have then:

“The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.” ~Psalm 126:3

He has.

My God, He has.

We celebrate because devastation didn't get the final word.

Because eleven years later, there is life where I once saw only dry bones.

There is abundance where things had been eaten away.

There is a marriage where I once saw wreckage.

There is joy.

The little marriage that could, did.

But only because the God Who could, did first. 🩷