Skip to main content

Walking Together

When I married John over 21 years ago, I assumed that in 21 years, our marriage would be darn near perfect.  Well, here we are, 21 years later, and it's not quite there yet.

When I married him, I assumed that it would only be a matter of time before I fixed everything that bothered me about him.  From leaving the phone book on the floor (in Wymount Terrace at BYU), to correcting his grammar (the dog was barking at him and I), to hoping he would brush his teeth, or eat a mint before he kissed me--I would get him to change, because I was right.

Well, I quickly discovered that the large piece of lumber in my eye (i.e. the mote) was harming our relationship.  Not only was my "perfection" (i.e. pride) causing me to ignore the flaws in myself, but it was obscuring the view of the many characteristics of my husband that are divine.  Oh my goodness, the baggage I brought into our marriage--he could have written a book about all of my flaws.

While he still leaves out the phone book occasionally, and prayers can be painful to my grammatical psyche, he did brush his teeth before kissing me until I lost my sense of taste and smell (oh, the irony!)  I continue to work on being a more patient, accepting (i.e. nonjudgemental) person, although pride rears its ugly head more times than I want to admit.  Despite the fact that he never has a critical word to say to me, I continue to pick on his very small, insignificant traits.

What I forget to see is how much people love John because he loves them.  I can't begin to count the number of times he has stopped along the road to help someone with a broken down car.  In fact, my boys can't pass up someone who needs help now, because they have learned it from their father.  On the weekend, when he could be relaxing, or watching TV, he's out rebuilding a pond for eight hours for an elderly woman.  His payment?  A couple of fish for our pond (or however many he can catch from hers).  When a family was falling away from the church because they had been offended because their grandson hadn't been helped appropriately and was going to lose his chance of earning Eagle, John stepped in, smoothed relations between the family and the church leaders, and made everything happen (i.e. pulled some strings) to make sure the boy could earn the Eagle rank.  My most recent complaint to John is that he isn't home enough.  Let me remove the mote from my eye so that I can see how selfish I have been.

Another major issue I had with John when we got married was that he always walked in front of me, even when we were holding hands.  It had nothing to do with attitude, but instead had to do with the length of his legs.  I felt like he was disrespecting me, and not thinking about me.

Remember what I said about John loving people?

I can't remember the last time John walked in front of me, but he has for the past 20 years, walked beside me.  He has walked beside me through student poverty, through four children under the age of nine, through more callings than the two of us can count, through health problems, through medical school and residency and through all the funny, happy, fulfilling times too.  As he constantly tells me (and as people constantly notice), everything in his life is done to make me happy.  And looking back on the past 21 years, I can't deny it.  He makes me happy in every way.



Comments

  1. Thanks for being so honest about your relationship. This is such an inspiration to me. So many people only talk about the wonderful things and I am glad to see I am not the only one that has bumps in the road some times.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sometimes, we can choose to open two eyes wide and see all the faults or shut one eyes and let some go...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Like Dominos....

It all began with glare.  Simple, obnoxious, I-can't-stand-it-anymore glare. Our 60" rear projection TV in the family room was basically unviewable except after 10 o'clock at night.  The glare from the windows was making it impossible to see anything during my 10 minute lunch break each day, and something had to change. Too, the TV didn't fit in the entertainment center from Germany.  John, wanting bigger and better, hadn't considered that the space is only 40" wide.  For the past five years, I have been nagged by 6" of overhang on both sides of the TV stand. I went to Lowe's to price blinds.  $1,043 for five blinds, and that was at 20% off. I figured a new TV would be cheaper than that.  I was right, even with the state-of-the-art receiver and new HDMI cables that sly salesman told us we needed to have. But where to put the old TV?  It just needed a quiet, dark place to retire. Glo's bedroom.  Her TV was a relic from the paleoneoneand...

SURPRISE!!

When the pizza guy came to the door last night, here's what John saw: It took a few seconds for John to process who the pizza delivery man was, but when he did, he was incredibly happy (and couldn't stop saying "heeeeyyyyy....".  It was Jared Moran, John's best friend. And me, I just knelt down, right then and there, and began repenting of all the lies that I have told over the last four months, hiding this most amazing surprise :-)  I told Sarah the other day that I was glad to see the light at the end of the falsehood tunnel, because if I kept this up much longer, I was destined to end up in liars' hell... Jared ran the Air Force marathon with John last year.  It was his first marathon, and from what he told us, his last.  However, he called in June and said he was coming again, but I was supposed to keep it a surprise from John.  I'm not sure what changed his mind, but we sure are glad he did.  John hates runnings marathons alone, and ther...

A Quick Trip to Mackinac Island

Allow me a pity party for a paragraph.  As much as John is earning buckets of money for us and for our retirement, his weekend calls have been infringing on our time together.  Like I said, it's a complete pity party, because my logical mind reminds me that I should be happy he's making so much money, but my heart feels rather lonely at times as I reminisce about trips we have taken that we don't have time to take again. I love John.  I don't need him around all the time, but I find that the best quality time with him is when he doesn't have other distractions like work, and call, and hospital credentialing. Anyway, I guess that was two paragraphs, and I don't need to take it any further than that, because I don't want the body of this blog post to be about me and my loneliness. I've been wanting to go to Mackinac Island for two years now (I can hardly even believe that it's been that long since I was there).  With Lake Michigan getting colder and th...