29 years!

Yesterday MJM and I celebrated 29 years of marriage, as MJM would say...209 looooooooong years.

This morning I was thinking, How DID WE make it to 29 years.  Those who know us, know that we got married, well, cuz we were pregnant...and had only known each other a few months when we did.  So, how did this work?

God - within a couple of years of our marriage, I experienced being 'born again'.  I had heard about God all my life, growing up next door to Southern Baptists who truly lived their faith, but never truly understood that it was about that personal relationship with Christ.   MJM's born again ah-hah moment came years later, but I've always said that it was Christ who built this family.    We were a couple of immature kids, who made what some would call a 'mistake', but God took that 'seed' and created a family.

Gossip - huh?  No, it was a deciding moment in my life that I would not gossip about my husband.  I used to be one of those clucking hen women who would sit around comparing and outdoing stories about whose husbands are the bigger a*hole.  When I made the decision to stop hanging out with these women, I may have lost a 'friendship" or 2...but it was a huge relief off my shoulders, like a freedom from a 'negativity' cloud.

D-word - MJM and I decided a long time ago, that the D-word (divorce) did not exist in our marriage.  Our feeling is that if we felt like that was an option, we would never truly try to work things out.

Never let the sun go down - When we had issues, we would stay up all night and into the wee morning hours to discuss it.  We truly believed the verse about "never let the sun go down on your anger, lest you give the devil a foothold'.   The couple of times we did go to bed angry and let it simmer was awful.  Things do not 'work out in the morning'...it just hangs over you...I attribute it to the 3 year period in which I was completely shut down to MJM.   (he says he had to buy me a Volkswagon New Beetle to bring me out of it) .  I say I finally had an ah-hah moment that that is what I did...Instead of working things out with him, I just thought, '3 more years, C graduates and I'm out of here" and went to bed with that thought.  Gave the ol' devil that foothold and lost 3 years.

Happiness comes from within - as long as we had the concept that MJM was supposed to MAKE me happy or that I was supposed to MAKE him happy, nobody was happy.   A few years ago, we came to the conclusion that that happiness comes from within ourselves...and that it is not the other person's job to MAKE the other happy.   I like how Pastor Dusty put it a li'l while ago, that "it is not his wife's job to make him happy, but to make him holy".   Maybe that is why God has a tendency to put us with our opposite, so we can complete each other and test each other.

Acceptance - another freeing moment was when I realized I couldn't change him...and I didn't really want to.  I'd say this was in the last 5 years or so... while still in San Jose, in the early years,  I had learned the concept of 'the holy gag'...instead of nagging and reacting to give it to God.  But within the past 5 years, I've also learned to see him as my bff.  Does he drive me crazy at times, sure!!  Do we fight about it?  sure!!   But I know deep down I can accept who he is.

So, is it perfect between us?  Heck no...is it worth it?   Heck yes!!

I am one lucky girl.