My, my, it has been forever!
I am sitting at home at 11:30 on a Friday night. Not only am I taking a break from cleaning, doing laundry, exercising a bit in between, contemplating doing this dishes, and resisting the urge to devulge myself in Blue Bell Banana Split ice cream, but I am also doing what I do almost every Friday night….waiting for my husband to get home from work.
I’ve been married now for almost 3 months. It has been amazing, and marriage is all that I hoped it would be…and it’s some things I didn’t exactly…ahem…hope for.
Usually when people think of newlyweds, I suppose they think of lazy Saturday mornings, bubble fights while washing dishes together, random and crazy sexcapades, the very few and far between arguments, etc. I suppose this is what I thought it would be like to an extent, but I am a realist (and somewhat of a pessimist, though I hate to admit that), so I knew it would be a lot more boring stuff…farting in bed, scooping hair out of the shower, adjusting to sharing EVERYTHING.
But never, never in my life did I imagine my marriage would entail having very little time with my husband. Times are hard, and our economy is crashing, forcing me to work 50+ hours a week at least just to scrape by. It’s been impossible to find a decent job for me. Josh spends his days in school and at work. Sometimes we don’t see each other from 7am to 1am (yes, that’s 18 hours), and then our time together involves sawing logs.
Every once in a while we’ll get a few hours where our schedules gel, and we’ll get that oh-so-treasured time together that we can really engage, learn about what God is teaching us, talk about the future, and cook a meal together. I wait days, and sometimes over a week for time like this, and I would lose precious sleep after a 12 hour work day just to sit and be with my husband.
I know that the Lord is teaching me to trust Him in these times. I know that He’s teaching me what it means to rely on Him for the grace to get through one more day, and to understand that He will provide for us…even when we are in the red after paying our bills. And I’m counting on Him to keep that spark in our marriage that He so marvelously gave to us.
I’m not sure what lies ahead in the future, but I know that I’ll have my husband and my Lover by my side the whole time, and that makes the hard times totally worth it.
