An Unconventional Love Story

In about a week and a half my husband and I will celebrate our 7th wedding anniversary, and it's got me thinking.   Ours is an unconventional love story that started long before we said I DO 7 years ago.

It all started when I was 15.  I had a friend come up to me and pull me aside to tell me that this guy who hung around with her boyfriend liked me, and I should go out with him.  My response was something to the effect of: that guy, he never talks.  I don't think that we had ever had a full conversation before that.  She did some convincing and I figured, why not, he was cute and no guy had ever wanted to go out with me before.  Oh how awkward that beginning was.  Of course aren't they all in high school?  We started "going out" the day before Christmas break and I pretty sure I didn't talk to him until we came back to school two weeks later.  I started to wonder if I had made it up, so I didn't tell anyone.  I was 16 and it was five or six months later before we went out on our first date.  We went and walked around the mall talking for hours it seems.  He was all of my firsts. My first date.  The first guy I held hands with.  My first kiss and it only took us about a year of dating before I let him kiss me.  There were plenty of other awkward moments along the way.  Like when I ignored him the first time that he told me that he loved me because it terrified me.  I think I was sixteen, and I know that I was jaded after seeing some of the relationships that I had seen.  On top of that even then I knew this was special at least as much as you can at that age.  We dated through the rest of high school, through the good times and the bad.  Through my husbands tough times at school.  Through my first year in college where I was miserable being 3+ hours away from him.  I remember the promise ring that he gave me when I went away to school.  I remember the two proms that we went to together and the way my mother looked at me when I came home with blue hair to go to his senior prom.
When I came home from college that summer I lived in his moms house, because they had a spare bedroom for me.  Everything got so much easier when he moved to Clemson that fall.  In my junior year at Clemson we went to a concert and toward the end he told me that he had planned to propose to me, without a ring, if they played my favorite song.  The encore that they played right after that included my favorite song of course.  Then I had to explain to him that he needed a ring no matter how cheap and I wanted him to ask my mom first.  I remember the day that he called my mom, and then he told me he talked to her.  My response of course was to ask him if he was going to propose to me now or what.  And he did right there in his room in his apartment because we do everything super romantic.  Then we spent about another 2.5 years engaged before we got married.
Before our wedding I cried because nothing turned out the way that I wanted it.  Once I began the walk down the aisle toward him none of that mattered.  None of the craziness of that day mattered because at the end we were married.  We were in our awkward love story.
This love story that eventually got to include my two girls.  The first of which I had to tell him it was time for whether he was ready or not.  Thankfully before I got pregnant with her he got the job that made him feel like maybe we could do it.  And we have.  Our love story may not be what some people think or expect, but it has kept us happily together fro going on 15 years, which is half my life.  I couldn't imagine what it would be like not to do everyday with him and the beautiful children he helped me to create.  This is our not so perfect unconventional love story, and I wouldnt have it any other way.

My heart

I haven't known what to say lately.  I feel like I've been in a weird place.  I feel isolated, disconnected.    I feel disconnected from myself, those around me, even God within me.  It is hard feeling to deal with especially when you don't know where to start.
In the past week or so I've gotten to hear a lot about the heart nod it has gotten me thinking.  I have gotten to hear about how a sinful heart is what separates you from God, about how your heart is the true master of your tongue (so if you ant to know the true state of your heart all you have to do is listen to hat comes out of your mouth), and then today about what kind of soil is there in your heart for God to plant his message in.
Well I can tell you one thing for certain based on what comes out of my mouth there are some very unkind and hard feelings in my heart.  I know that there is not nearly enough kindness coming from my heart out of my mouth.  In truth there is an awful lot of ugly coming out of there sometimes and what does that say about my heart?  And is this ugliness what is making me feel so separated.
Today the preacher talked about the parable where the seeds are sown in different soils, and he asked us what kind of soil we had in our heart?  With all the contemplation I have been doing about the state of my heart lately that was a particularly poignant question.  Is my heart th path where the birds are eating up the seeds as soon as they are thrown?  Is it the rocky soil where the seed takes hod for a minute then the sun burns it up because it has no roots?  Is it the soil where anything that starts to grow there gets choked out by the thorns of life?  I know that right now it is not the good soil where the seeds take hold an flourish.  The more I think about it the more convinced I am that every time something beautiful starts growing in there all the thorns of life just choke any life out of those poor seeds.  I feel like in my life right now I am so burdened by the suffering of others.  So many in my life right now are hurting and I can't fix it.  (I am a fixer). Not being able to make things better for them, and yet feeling like I should be able to adds a torn to my heart for each one of them.  What feels like serious lack of progress in my spiritual life adds thorns to my heart.  Every time I think about one of the ways in which I am not a good enough person it's like it adds another thorn.  Another source of these thorns in my life are all of the comparisons that I keep telling myself I'm going to stop making.  And lastly is my lack of trust.  When I cannot simply trust God, that doubt chokes out another seed that has been planted.
Honestly I'm not exactly sure what it is I'm supposed to do about these things that I have realized, but asking God to weed the garden of my heart cannot be a bad place to start.