Thankful for a marriage that went off-script

It’s been 17 years since my wife and I vowed to stick together for the rest of our lives.

I’m so happy and thankful to be stuck with her (cue Huey Lewis and the News).

She’s not what I set out to find when I was young.

Being a Bible-carrying, door-knocking, side-parting, tie-wearing, tract-reading Church of Christ kid, I went off to three Church of Christ colleges for a total of six years, thinking I’d meet and wed a Church of Christ girl from Tennessee or Texas.

We’d settle in the Bible Belt and have three kids. I’d become a deacon and then an elder at our local Church of Christ. She would teach Sunday school.

That was the script I thought I had coming for life.

Instead, I married a Catholic girl from Michigan who went to art school. Instead of meeting at a Wednesday night worship or on a mission trip, we met at the museum where we both worked. She’s not the sip of Southern sweet tea I imagined; she’s a gulp a hard apple cider.

And being with her is not easy. When you’re young and marriage is a daydream, it all looks like a Sunday afternoon in a hammock.

You know that most marriage moments, however, are like Monday mornings when everyone is trying to get out the door to school and work.

Tempers get hot more often than the mood for romance.

Seventeen years later, I love my wife more than I ever knew that I could love someone. It’s a choice, yes; it’s also a feeling that makes what I felt on our wedding day seem boyish by comparison.

What I want to say is this: Maybe we often think that marriage is a place where we get to be our real selves. So we love the fantasy of marriage because we think it’s how our dreams will come true.

But when God went “off script” in bringing my wife and me together, God revealed God’s purpose for marriage. It’s to change me, not into who I want to be, but who I need to be (and who God makes me to be). The things that make life with my wife so challenging are exactly the things I need to grow up into the character and image of the model Husband.

I shudder to think of who I would have become if God stuck to my script for marriage. And I would have missed out on life with this woman.

She is my pearl of great price.

Who is daily unburying the worth in me.