Dear Eric,

I have a feeling you will remember this week, though maybe not for happy reasons. Your work was hard – not in the way where I listen and want to tell you to stick it out, but in the way that my heart aches with the stress and the burden you are under. I wish I was in a more lucrative position to give you the chance to up and quit, because I know you thought about it multiple times on Monday and Tuesday.

And your job is not the only sinker pulling you down — after two weekends and somewhere around 20 hours of labor, your 4Runner still won’t start. To avoid sharing a car yesterday, you rode your motorcycle to work in chilly weather, only to have the battery die on you at a gas station up the street. It’s not a fantastic ratio to have two out of three motorized vehicles out of commission.

On top of all of this, you have been sick for the past 36 hours (ironic, since this letter is about health). You got home from work last night and immediately curled up on our loveseat (one day, we will have a normal sized couch, I promise) under our favorite green blanket. I got home to a kitchen full of dirty dishes from having dinner guests the night before, frantically sighed, and surrendered to Little Caesar’s offer of a $5 pizza. Those dishes are still sitting there this morning, lounging in the residue of pot roast and cheese grits. This real life stuff is romantic, let me tell ya.

Yet the sun is rising this morning just the same. I can catch glances of wispy clouds between the silhouettes of naked trees out our living room window. Traffic is picking up on our little street, the one people in the east part of town use as a cut-through to College. The neighbors are scraping frost off their windshields, and I am grateful for a janky-yet-functional carport courtesy of our landlords. A verse about mercies being new each morning repeats in my head as I hear you stretch and groan in your barely-conscious state.

Even a year or two ago, this week would have had me in tears. Sharing a car and working in different towns would have provoked daily tensions in our relationship and in our home. The emotional burden you carry back from work would have once pushed us apart, a distance I couldn’t quite grasp. Lies of loneliness used to drag me down when we didn’t get quality time in the evenings, like last night when you fell asleep so early. We may not have fully figured out adulthood yet (does anyone ever?), but I see progress on our journey. That trailhead from three years ago is in the distance, and even when it feels like we are climbing up rocks by hands and feet, the view keeps getting better.

And that’s how I feel about healing and wholeness. We aren’t there yet, and I still see wounds in you, in us, from the parts of the journey that still don’t make sense – but we are healthier than we were a year ago, and I think that means we are walking in the right direction.

Feel better, babe. I love you.

Love,
me.

_______________________________

 

Amber at The Runamuck is starting up a marriage letters series again! This month wasn’t an official link-up, but you should check out her recent marriage letter. Starting in February, I will be linking up with others at the start of the month who are also practicing the habit of blessing their husbands and their marriages.