Together we fill gaps

"Falling in love is something that happens to us, being is love is something we do." — C.S. Lewis

In June, my husband and I celebrated 30 years of marriage. Thirty years, folks. Man, does that make me feel old.

The years have swirled by in a mist of memories. Here we stand at Year Thirty. As I look back, I am grateful that we stuck it out together, if only by God’s grace. There’s no way we’d be together today if we had not clung to each other out of sheer conviction that it was the right thing to do.

I look back at our youth and realize that we were two wounded souls, each bringing plenty of baggage to our marriage. It didn’t take long for the stresses of marriage to bring our individual dysfunctions to the surface.

We can laugh about many of the early episodes now, like the time we got into an argument at the dinner table and he threw a jar of blue cheese dressing at the wall. Through clenched teeth, I angrily responded, “If you think I’m going to clean that up, you’ve got another thing coming!” Yep, I cleaned it up.

But there have also been episodes that we can’t look back and laugh about. The really heavy stresses involved business failure, loss of loved ones, bankruptcy, infertility, and cancer. And we’re not even finished yet.

On occasion, I have wondered how two such opposite people could have married. But I think that’s why we were attracted to each other in the first place. In the memorable words of Rocky (1976), “I dunno, she's got gaps, I got gaps, together we fill gaps.” I knew there was a reason I loved Rocky.

My husband has always been able to make me laugh and I guess that’s important. There have been a few particularly rough patches when we really didn’t like each other very much. I don’t know if that happens in other marriages, but it’s happened in ours. But because we’ve never believed that we should base our decisions on our feelings, we were able to make it past those stormy phases (and some of them seemed very long).

We’ve reached out for help along the way. We attended a few marriage conferences, read some books, met with counselors. Anything we could do to try to figure out how to live happily together. To be honest, becoming Orthodox helped us more than anything. It is bringing us into alignment; we’re more on the same page now.

We still have our struggles, but Orthodoxy is teaching us to focus on our own shortcomings and not those of the other. It will be a lifetime struggle, but with it comes more humility.

Being together this long brings a certain profundity to a relationship. We realize our need for one another in a more acute way. After this long, you have the sense that you have something significant together . . . an emotional, physical, mystical bond. That bond is part of your psyche, your soul, your entire being. When something threatens that bond, it’s almost unbearable to think about. At least, that’s how I felt when I was diagnosed with cancer three years ago. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect my husband felt the same way.

A couple of years ago, I was interviewed by the local hospital for an article in their community magazine. It was about my cancer experience. Maybe the interview didn’t fit their angle or my story wasn’t riveting enough, I don’t know, but the interview was never published.

I wasn’t sure how to prepare for the interview, so I just wrote down some thoughts and feelings I’d experienced and hoped that something I said might help someone else. What surprised me, though, is something I didn’t write down—it just came out of my mouth.

The thing I said that surprised me—because I’d never said it before—was that my husband is my Rock. And I’ve thought of that statement many times since then and realized that it’s absolutely true (which is good, since I said it in an interview). I can’t imagine my life without him. He is always there for me. He is indeed my Rock. I have not been thankful enough for the good gift of my life’s companion, my Rock.

Watching our daughter’s foray into the world of romantic love has given me a new outlook on my marriage. It’s made me realize even more what a glorious gift love is. I think God brings us together in those early days by allowing us to see our beloved the way He sees them, the beauty of their soul laid bare for our eyes alone. How did all the others miss this precious treasure?

As life unfolds, it becomes harder to see with those eyes. We have to deal with the necessities of the moment and our passions and selfishness get in the way. But if we cling to God and to each other, learning how to forgive, something new and deeper and more beautiful has grown in place of those first days of romance: “we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbor as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival.” -- C.S Lewis

I just finished reading A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story, a wonderful book detailing not only what makes a good story for books and movies, but how to live a good story. In a chapter titled, “You’ll Be Different at the End,” author Donald Miller talks about a friend named Marcus who devoted a year of his life to a research project trying to understand whether our physical bodies said something about our philosophical reality (sounds weird, but stay with me . . . ). Miller writes:

“I asked Marcos what he’d discovered; and he said, essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural instability, and then they find themselves at an ending that seems designed for reflection.

At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. He didn’t know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn’t the search but the transformation the search creates.”

From this vantage point in life, Marcus’ observations ring very true. I find myself looking forward less—unless it’s to my eternal home--and reflecting more on the life I’ve had.

My husband and I are not the same people who married those 30 years ago. We are older and hopefully, wiser. At each moment in our marriage, we have made choices. Some of those choices were not good. Other choices can only be chalked up to listening to a divine Voice, urging us to love and to forgive. It’s those choices that kept us together and gave us hope that whatever trial we were going through, would pass.

Our challenge now is to beat back the temptation to call it a day, thinking we’ve got it all figured out. Our task is to keep on loving and forgiving and to finish the race set out before us.

On good days, I feel like these 30 years represent a significant accomplishment. On other days, I feel that I have learned nothing and that I’m just as much a mess as I ever was. And you know what? We’ve still got gaps. I have an inner knowledge that we have been blessed in spite of our many mess-ups and that God multiplied even our smallest efforts at choosing good. Indeed, He is the great gap-filler.

In honor of our 30th anniversary, I put together a four-and-a-half-minute video chronicling our years together, beginning with our courtship. Most of the words to Alan Jackson’s song, Remember When, seemed quite fitting—enough so that it’s hard for me to view the video without tears.

You can view the video, embedded below, or you can go directly to the Animoto website to view it here.

(If you have a fast Internet connection, the video should only take a few seconds to stream; if not, be prepared for a longer wait while it downloads.)

Comments

[Tim Storey]

Dana,
You are such a wonderful writer. Reading any of your writings makes me want to try harder and work harder at writing because I know that I don't even come close to your work. Yet, I want to be able to write like this. I know that someday all these blogs will lead to your first book.
Tim