Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Marriage

Henceforth, my birthday will NOT occur during finals week

And while we’re at it, I’d like to move Mother’s Day to August.

That said, I was intending to go in an entirely different direction with this post. It was all about me: how I hate that my birthday is often overlooked in our house because of finals, papers or, in the past, Army trainings/deployments; how the same is true of Mother’s Day because it also falls during finals week; how poor, poor me was in tears on my birthday and feeling unloved on Mother’s Day.

Then a delivery man brought this to my door:

(The instructions said to consume immediately. Who was I to argue? Especially concerning those chocolate-dipped apple slices.)

And I received a belated birthday card that made me smile.

And even though I’ve had a rough week, and I really did cry on my birthday and nearly told my husband off on Mother’s Day, my heart wasn’t in the post that I was writing.

It was ungrateful, selfish and truly pitiful. Even I wouldn’t have read it.

So let me tell you what I’ve learned this week:

  • Birthdays are just another day. I used to get upset at my dad for feeling this way about his birthday, but I sort of get it now. Yes, May 4 is the anniversary of the day I was born, and no, we can’t always celebrate it on that day. Does that mean my birthday has no meaning? That we can’t celebrate it at all? Nope. May 18 is the rescheduled day of my birth this year. My husband will prepare my pre-selected menu of meals that day, and I hope, have had time to buy me something nice. (Phil, if you’re reading this, you’ve gotten the hint, now get back to writing those papers!)
  • The postal service has not outlived its usefulness yet. At least, not in my book. More than 100 people posted a birthday greeting on my wall. (If you were one of them, thank you for that!) I also received a couple of e-mail greetings/cards. For me, though, there’s nothing like getting a card in the mail on your birthday. Some people see that as a waste of money, and if that’s your view, that’s fine. But let me tell you this story: my grandmother paid $18 in postage to ensure that my birthday card arrived ON my birthday. Extravagant? Perhaps. But love makes you do crazy things sometimes. I am resolved to try harder to send cards in the mail for birthdays and other special moments. I will fail, but I will try harder.
  • In the absence of family, friends and church family shine like stars in the night sky. I was overwhelmingly blessed by warm well-wishes for my birthday and Mother’s Day by people I’ve known less than 3 years but who feel like they’ve been a part of our lives forever.

When I look back on the pain I caused myself this week with too-high expectations and roller-coaster emotions, I wish I could take back the time I lost. But I can only move on, look ahead and hope that this time next year, no matter what does or does not happen in May, that I’m praising God for another year of life and motherhood.

Anything for love

Maybe it’s all the “Celebrity Apprentice” I’ve been watching lately, but I’ve been humming Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love” since watching a Royal Wedding special earlier this week. Meatloaf and the royal wedding — kind of a stretch, right? (By the way, did anyone ever figure out what “that” was? You know, “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”)

I was captivated by the Royal Wedding this morning. My husband set the alarm for me on his way out to the Y, and I had one hour of uninterrupted fairy tale romance time before the children woke up. (Side note: This bone china mug arrived in the mail this afternoon, straight from England, for my birthday. I’m a little giddy about it.)

Weddings, in general, have taken on new meaning for me since I’ve been married. My husband and I celebrate four years of marriage in less than a month, and it’s been a roller coaster ride so far but worth every crested hill and sharp turn.

During this television special earlier in the week, one of the reporters commented that he thought Kate would prefer that she wasn’t marrying a prince, that she would like to lead a nice, quiet life in the country and raise a family outside of the public arena. That struck me as truly amazing and sacrificial. Despite her personal preference, for the sake of love, she is entering a life she would not have chosen for herself, a life that will have its difficulties in lack of privacy, rules of etiquette, public appearances and possibly even threats to personal safety. All for love. She could have decided it wasn’t worth it, but for love of a man, who happens to be prince, she is choosing to sacrifice her idea of an ideal life and enter a world that certainly is different from what she has known.

In a sense, it’s what we all do when we get married. We join our lives to someone else’s, aligning our dreams, ambitions and goals to theirs, come what may. I didn’t understand this fully when I got married, and I’m not sure I ever will understand it fully, but joining my life to a man preparing to be a pastor has required sacrifice of things I thought I wanted and expectations I had for how life would be. But I wouldn’t change the choice I made to marry him. For me, there was no one else. He could have been a beggar asking me to live in a cardboard box with him or an astronaut with dreams of living on the moon. That’s the thing about love, the craziest of notions don’t seem all that crazy and as long as I’ve got my husband walking next to me hand-in-hand, I believe we can face anything together.

I imagine Kate could be afraid of the future. She will be queen someday. How do you live every day with that knowledge? Most little girls dream of being a princess; she literally is one. All because she loved a man.

Those of us who choose to join our lives with Christ experience this kind of love, too. For love of the one who first loved us, we’ll do things we never thought we could, give up the lives we’ve always wanted for the lives we never thought we could have. Living the Christ-life is scary, risky, unpredictable and difficult sometimes, but it’s also fulfilling, joyful, purposeful, abundant and freeing. Having experienced life with Christ, I hope that we would say we can’t imagine life any other way.