When everything falls apart…

I am so thankful for my husband. He is more gracious and compassionate and understanding of me and my quirks than I ever dared to dream, and every day, he shows me how much he believes in me and, because of his faith in me, makes me believe that maybe – just maybe – I really am more than I let myself believe.

He has seen me through incredible brokenness. Within weeks after getting engaged to me, he found himself face-to-face with a woman he didn’t know. I was seized by emotional turmoil and impenetrable sadness. I cried at the drop of a hat but couldn’t explain why. Some of the turmoil, I’m sure, was due to the chaos of planning a wedding in 3 months. Some of it, too, was the result of the changes and adjustments that engagement and marriage brought into my life; things only got worse after the wedding. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and panic soon after we were married, and from there we embarked on a journey neither of us had ever anticipated.

It was rough, to say the least. Every evening when he came home from work he found an empty shell of the woman he had fallen in love with. I had neither the energy nor the desire to be the wife he deserved and that God calls me to be, but he graciously embraced me – heartache and all – and never put any pressure or additional guilt on me. I was placing plenty of guilt on myself, to be sure, and I think he saw that what I needed from him was grace. When I felt like my world was falling apart, our relationship was the one thing that seemed to hold me together. I leaned on God, of course, but there was something about my husband and the strength he gave to the situation that made a major difference. God healed (and continues to heal) me, but Scott, with his gentle strength, was right there, working in tandem with the Lord to bring me back.

This was all brought to mind recently when Leah accidentally broke a small candle holder as she played. When I saw the glass pieces shattered on the bathroom floor, a little piece of me wanted to cry, since it was one of the votive holders that we gave to guests at our wedding.

As I looked at it, though, and tried my hardest to keep Leah’s little bare feet away from the shards of glass, I began to see something beautiful. My mind wandered back to those early days of our marriage when it felt, in a very real way, like all we had was each other. The world was falling apart around us (and inside me), but our relationship held together and pulled us through.

I saw this in a new way as I looked on the broken glass. Pieces were scattered all across the floor. Tiny fragments littered the tile. I noticed, though, that one large piece was still held together…not because it wasn’t broken, but because of the sticker we had placed on the votive holders as a memento of our wedding day.

Just as our relationship held me together (or at least kept the emotional wreckage to a minimum), the little label commemorating our wedding day kept the cleanup to a minimum. Things were still broken, but were still held together somehow.

In a way, I think that’s a beautiful illustration of how God designed marriage to be. I don’t pretend that our marriage is perfect. It isn’t. We’ve had struggles and disagreements and tensions from day one, and I’m sure we will continue to do so. However, we are one. We were united before the Lord and by the Lord, and it is Him that holds us together when everything else in our lives falls apart. I think that is God’s concept of marriage. We struggle sometimes, yes, but ultimately, we are bound together. That’s the joy of marriage.

God has also designed marriage to be seen by others. It is intensely personal, certainly, but it isn’t meant to be for the husband and wife alone. The world needs to see your marriage, and when they do, they should be something beautiful. They should see peace. Love. Joy. Unity. When the rest of our lives are chaos, our marriages should be the only things that make sense because the Lord is at the center. He holds our marriages together, our marriages hold us together, and through it all, the world sees something beautiful.

"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. (Ephesians 5:31-33)