Letting stories unfold around the table
Two years ago this past weekend, I put on white dress, took my dad’s arm, and walked down a grassy “aisle” to marry the man of my dreams. It was a sweet, slow day full of joyful moments with people from all the different parts of our lives and our story. Today, in honor of my sweet husband who makes my world a whole lot brighter, I want to go back and share how our love story started. Some of you might already know this story but for me, it just never seems to get old!
Two years ago this week, Jordan and I were soaking in the final crazy days before our wedding. As friends and family started to arrive in town, the whirlwind of a wedding weekend began. We set up the barn, had our picnic rehearsal dinner at a local park, and then finally jumped into our wedding day. There were so many things I loved about how our wedding turned out. It was exactly like I had dreamed, and I still love flipping through our wedding pictures and video to remember all the little moments and details of the day.
When we look back on our wedding, our favorite part is all the ways that day told our story. Our wedding was uniquely us – a mixture of all the things, people, places, and ideas that defined our story and the story we were about to begin. While we had pulled in elements from weddings and styles we liked, we felt that our wedding represented who we are in so many ways .
There were a lot of things that went into planning our wedding day and making it ours. These five wedding planning tips below are the things I learned from planning our Memorial Day weekend, barn wedding two whole years ago, and I would do all of these things again in a heartbeat!
“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
Brené Brown –The Gifts of Imperfection
The first time I remember feeling shame, that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that something’s wrong with me, was in middle school. I struggled in my relationships with girl friends, and remember one particular conversation with a girl friend who told me she didn’t want me around when the boy she liked was there because I was “too much,” and when I was my full self I was “obnoxious.” I know that those words came out of a place of her own insecurity and fears, but they impacted me deeply.
I started to believe that who I am is obnoxious, that I needed to tone down my personality, my happiness, my intelligence, and myself in general to be liked and even loved by others. I desperately sought attention from boys, believing that giving them my body and my heart was the only way to overcome my “obnoxious” personality and be “loved” the way I was longing for. When I compromised my boundaries and values to make them happy, I felt an even deeper sense of disappointment and shame.
“Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won’t matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength.”
Tim Keller – Meaning of Marriage
When Jordan and I got married, we knew we weren’t signing up for a lifetime of romance and forever happiness. We were lucky to have couples of all ages loving us, asking us hard questions, and speaking truth to us.. As we spent time with these people, one thing consistently stood out: these couples whose love had stood the test of time, tragedy, and trials of all sorts firmly believed that their marriages had a much bigger purpose than their “happiness.” These people trusted that their marriage was something God would use to shape them, to draw them to Him, and to paint a picture to the world of His love, joy, and commitment.
Photo: Kenzie Kate Photography
After the chaos of the wedding faded and the daily realities of marriage began to sink in, we wanted to revisit the things we had admired in those married couples who had counseled and inspired us. We decided to spend some time processing our dreams, values, and goals for our marriage, hoping that through writing out these thoughts, we could come up with a mission statement that summarized a bigger picture and purpose for our marriage.
We sat down together and started to brainstorm, focusing mainly on these questions:
My heart for this blog is that it be a place of Sobremesa, a place where we can share the joyful, the real, and the hard. This story is one of the hard ones (and like most hard stories, it is ultimately a story of hope). Thanks for joining me at the table.
A few of my Young Life girls
My years in college were life-changing. I met women whose friendships taught me how to be loved and to love the sisters in my life, and whose daily encouragement got me through the many ups and downs of those years. I led Young Life for four years, and pursuing high school students wrecked me in the best of ways. At any given moment I felt like I could point to three or four things I felt like God was teaching me in that season. I cried more, laughed more, and grew more in my four years of college than any other season I can remember. It was incredibly hard, but incredibly good, and I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.
After a whirlwind summer living in Panama post-graduation, I moved to Kansas City and jumped right into my new “grownup” life there. I started working at a middle school during the day, taking grad classes several nights a week, and spending any free time learning to live in the same city as my formerly long-distance boyfriend. But even in the newness and excitement of a job, getting married, and settling into a life with my new husband, I longed for more. Where college had been a series of ups and downs, my new grownup life just felt…routine. I started to feel a growing indifference to spending time with God, and that indifference gradually became a bitterness and resentment that He had walked away from me, that he had stopped pursuing me the way He did in college.
I longed for more, for intimacy and fullness and joy, but my life felt routine and God seemed a million miles away. I longed to feel like I was making a difference, that who I was mattered in some bigger story. The intimacy I had experienced with God during college dwindled, and a growing bitterness and disappointment in Him took its place. I found myself crying in my car as I drove to work, unable to shake the heavy feelings of longing and emptiness. My mind would spin and spin until I had convinced myself that I would never experience fullness or freedom from shame, that my life and my story would never be what I longed for them to be. I kept teaching, kept going to church, and kept spending time with the people I love, but a current of sadness ran underneath it all.
