For William

Through the living room window, I watched him throwing a football with our fifteen-year-old son in the backyard. I knew his shoulder was hurting, and I’d expected him to say as much when the request came to toss a ball around. Every day they wait for his arrival: “Mom, when will Dad be home?” When he gets home, there’s basketball in the driveway—a made-up game they call “Burnt Toast”—and football in the backyard and family walks and Xbox challenges and “Mom, will you send dad up to pray for me?” at bedtime. I’ve lived with this man for just about twenty years, and I still wonder why I ended up with such a selfless human as my spouse. The football moved back and forth across the yard, and I watched them. Mouths moving. Conversations. Father. Son. Insignificant, hugely important moments that make up a relationship.

I can barely remember the early days of our marriage, to be honest. We ate out or ordered in a lot because I walked into this marriage with no idea how to cook and a deep misunderstanding of how to handle raw meat. I was a new college graduate with an English degree and no idea how to even boil an egg. Armed with the Betty Crocker Bridal Edition cookbook I’d received as a wedding gift, I learned by trial and error, and I only remember one meal that William found completely inedible. He tried, though, God bless him. I remember scraping the food into the trash myself. Raw squash in a quesadilla? What was I thinking?

We lived in a little bungalow now over a hundred years old in Tennessee. We met our neighbors and spent our evenings sitting on our front porch swing, watching them live their lives while we drank iced tea in glasses wet with condensation. Toe on the ground, I gently rocked the swing but not too much because the motion unsettled William’s stomach. I remember those first two years, before he was a pastor, before I was a writer, before our hopes of having children were crushed into bitterness by the fertility doctor. I remember the nights on the porch, iced tea glasses, humidity, hope, twilight, crickets, private jokes, contentment.

And then—a calling, a move, a church, a diagnosis, an emptied future, a new start. Two years married and our lives changed in one fell swoop. I can’t sum up the years since then and I won’t try. But, I’ve had a front row seat as the young man I married became a pastor who has faithfully served in a rural church for eighteen long years. I’ve watched him embrace adoption, pulling two boys into our family with as much paternal fierceness as anyone could imagine. I’ve felt the support of a man who says, “You can do this and I will help you make it happen” whenever I’ve dreamed a dream or said yes to something new. I think most husbands want their wives to be happy. William wants his to flourish.

And we do, my sons and me. We flourish with him at the helm. Because to William, leading a family means loving your family by giving yourself up for them. I remember driving home from an event about six years ago—I can’t even remember where. I’d been asked to play the piano and sing at some church event, but I really needed a guitarist to back me up. I remember the trip home in the family van, my husband at the wheel. “Thank you for playing the guitar with me,” I said. “I’ll play rhythm guitar for you anytime you want, babe,” he replied happily, his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. And he has. Our whole marriage. Stood behind me to support my dreams, worked faithfully to provide for our family, pastored with perseverance through long seasons of hardship, parented with wisdom and patience.

__________

We’re going to Maine for our twentieth anniversary next month. We’re headed back to the small town where we spent our honeymoon. We’re staying in the same bed and breakfast, same room even. It’s a trip we said we’d do at five years, ten, fifteen. But we haven’t for this reason or that, and even now it feels extravagant. But twenty years of growing older and closer should be celebrated, in my opinion. William always says, “We shouldn’t just be committed to sticking it out in marriage. We should be committed to joy in marriage.” And somehow, that’s the word I’d use to describe these twenty years with him: joy. Not always easy, because no one would call pastoral ministry “easy.” No one would call living with a wife who is often sick “easy.” No one calls twenty years of infertility “easy.” No one calls adoption “easy.” No one calls sticking it out “easy.” But, it doesn’t have to be easy to still be spilling over with joy. Joy that wakes up in the morning and says, “I recognize you. It’s still you. It will always be you.”

I miss our porch swing in Tennessee sometimes. I miss the amber hues of a setting sun over the Jewish synagogue just across the street. I miss the neighbors living their lives while we watched from the porch with our tea glasses and the scripted conversations we applied to the people living on our block. I miss the idea of everything being in front of us, blossoming with hope that hadn’t yet been exposed to sorrow.

But—

I wouldn’t go back for anything. Because joy in marriage grows with time, moving from the effervescent feelings of new love to the loyal, my-life-for-yours kind of faithfulness of a lived-in love. The kind that throws a football when your shoulder hurts. That plays Burnt Toast in the driveway after a long day of work. That happily sits in the background celebrating the accomplishments of others. That preaches his nine hundredth sermon with as much passion as his first.

He has played rhythm guitar in the background of my life for twenty years now, and I will never understand why I get to have so much joy.

Happy 45^th, William.