What Did I Sign Up For?

What Did I Sign Up For?  A Reflection on Marriage and Adversity.  

IF YOU WOULD HAVE TOLD ME THIS IS WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR I WOULDN’T HAVE GOTTEN MARRIED

                Seriously, I wouldn’t have.   Don’t misunderstand.  I don’t mean this in a negative way.  I’m just saying if you would have told the plucky mancub standing at the altar smiling, beard blowing in the wind, what the three years of marriage would entail, he would have promptly grabbed his ball and went home.  That’s right.  He would have tucked his tail between his legs and made a quick exit.

                 In the same vein, I love being married.  I love my wife and my daughter.  I love our growing family.  In all honesty it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.  But, tbh, the mancub standing at altar had no idea what it was going to be like...and here’s the shocker...that’s actually a good thing.

                

               The mystery is much more delicious than knowing.

                

               Having it all planned out can be advantageous.  Having expectations for how things are going to pan out or are supposed to be are all well and good, but, and here’s a quick tip for all of you soon-to-be-hitched or are in that I-really-wanna-get-married-so-bad-I-can-hardly-stand-it phase:  1. You never know what to expect.  2.  What you think is reasonably foreseeable isn’t going to occur the manner in which you think it should.

                

Here we are on our wedding day, looking hot!...
Blissfully unaware of the road ahead.

              But that’s ok.  Take the plunge.  If you’re about to say those vows and tie the knot, then you’re in this for life.  If you believe in immortality and incorruptibility then that means 100s upon 1000s of years.  Get used to it.  There is no turning back.  Who you were when you were dating is gone.  Who you will be six months from now will be different than who you are now.  The same goes for your spouse.  

                

             That’s ok.   

                

             Enter day 6 of our union.  We are driving from West Texas to the Hill Country for what is supposed to stop No. 3 of our honeymoon.  It’s raining, I’m driving fast.   The red and blues start flashing.  I’m pulled over.  The cop is threatening me and I’m in the middle of nowhere so of course my idealism kicks in and I start lecturing the cop on the finer points of constitutional law, the difference between administrative procedures and laws that apply to living persons, how since he couldn’t prove that the STRAWMAN, MATTHEW MONK wasn’t the same as the living man Matthew Monk, then he had no jurisdiction in the matter and had to let me go and if he didn’t he would be violating several of my inalienable rights and thus subject to penalties…well…he pulled me out of the car, beat me up and took me to jail.  There I was, sitting in a cell while my wife dealt with the cops by herself…and I thought I was being a hero and protecting her.  Then she had to shell out all of our wedding money to post bail.  Moral of the story:  I was still thinking like a bachelor idealist.  Getting arrested didn’t bother me…but now I had someone else to think about.  I spent the next year paying fines, going to anger management classes and trying to find steady work with a resisting arrest (Class B Misdemeanor) charge on my record.  Let’s just say this is not the best foot to start your marriage on.  I’m lucky.  My wife is a trooper.  She handled it all gracefully even though she should have let me have it.  She should have walked out the door.  Honestly I almost expected her to.  But she didn't.  

                

             A little more than a month later I got one of those phone calls no one ever expects to get.  I had finally landed a reasonably steady job.  Stef had booked a long term gig at her job too, so things were stabilizing and we were getting things sorted out after the arrest.  I woke up that morning and had a call from my friend that was made about 3 A.M.  He left a message and said I needed to call him back ASAP, and I quote, “It’s that bad.”  I called back.  He was asleep.  It was a few hours later, at church, I was in the middle of getting blasted by El Shaddai at church when my phone rang.  I stepped outside.  My friend said some words that didn’t make any sense.  Then I saw the new article.  It still didn’t make sense.  But there it was in black and white.  One of my best friends was in the middle of it all…something so twisted and bizarre that it belonged in a Stephen King novel.  Then the phone calls came.  Hundreds of them.  People asking me questions about my friend.  Questions I couldn’t answer.  Questions I didn’t know how to answer.  Investigators.  Reporters.  Accusations.  Assumptions. Presumptions.  Emotions that there aren’t words for and words there aren’t emotions for.  My wife stood with me through it all.  She gave me all the space I needed to process.  And let me talk her ear off to process when I knew she was tired of hearing about it all.  She was there to comfort me through all of it even when I thought there was no coming back from it.

                

Now we are 3 and we still got it!

             We weathered that storm.  The truth came to light.  Things settled.  Then someone got murdered a few yards from our front door.  All of the sudden our cute little ethnic neighborhood is being patrolled left and right for cops on high alert for gang-activity and narcotraffickers.  Protecting my wife took on a new light.  What was I thinking moving into this neighborhood in the first place?  It was cheap.  Close to my wife’s job and in a nice central location.  (She worked on the northside while I worked on the southside.)  Suddenly none of that was good enough.  Suddenly we needed more money and a better place to live.  Maybe the mancub was learning.

               

              We had a plan, we had an exit strategy.  Then I got laid off.  No warning.  A measly $200 as severance.  Now we have not enough for rent and we have to vacate.  Luckily we have a place to go.  It was tough.  We didn’t know where the $ was going to come from.  But everything got taken care of.  We got settled in.  Some new work started.  Then the best news we’d ever received happened!...Stef was pregnant!

                

             And the day after that I got laid off again and told to vacate the premises within a week.  I filed for unemployment.  Our great State Programs awarded my a grand total of $0 in unemployment benefits because I'm too old/too young caucasian and male.  

             AND THAT WAS JUST THE FIRST YEAR...

                

             Some friends took us in.  I started job hunting.  Things were looking up.  I had some leads and some interviews.  $ materialized out of nowhere.  Then one day, in the middle of the afternoon, Stef started bleeding, bleeding a lot.  We go to the ER.  They tell us she’s losing the baby.  Worst day of my life so far.

                

             We don’t lose the baby.  Miracle time!  I start a new job.  I get a promotion.  I get another promotion.  I get promotion number three and a company car.  We have enough money to get back into our own place.  We move. 

                

            Day one in our new place, Stef is cooking dinner and I thought she peed her pants, but the water keeps coming.  This isn’t normal.  This isn’t supposed to happen.  She’s only 20weeks.  We were preparing for this only…5 months down the road.  We go to the ER.  They tell us there’s nothing they can do.  At this point it’s a coin toss.  Worst day of my life.  Period. 

                

            I start a new job.  We’ve made it to 23 weeks.  They said if we made it this far, then our little girl has the best chance of making it.  I know she’s going to.  It’s the strangest thing.  I know my daughter already.  Tough like her mom.  Stubborn like her dad.

           We know Olive will spend some time in the NICU.  She's there for 149 days.  1 day shy of five months.  She comes home on oxygen support and a feeding tube.  She spends 10 hours a day hooked up to a feeding pump.  Every sign of a cold, or bug is news for alarm because her immune system is underdeveloped.  She made it.

            We made it.              

                

            The mancub that stood at the altar over a three years ago is not the person I see in the mirror right now.  And that’s ok.  Like I said, if I would’ve told him what was going to happen, he would’ve ran away scared.  But I’ve made it.  It hasn’t been easy, yet it has been easy.  The peace which has followed our little family in the midst of less than ideal circumstances is nothing short of supernatural.  Surely the Lord prepares for us a feast in the midst of our enemies.  The war is over.  

            When you stand upon that altar and present yourselves as living sacrifices to God and to one another, there really is no turning back. You have entered the threshold to a brand new reality, a new world entirely. And that’s ok.

Full Time Ministry is a Choice

The past two years for my husband and I have been interesting, to say the least. I think in many ways we have grown more in this short period of time than some people will in their entire lives. And if I am completely honest with you, it has been incredibly hard. But I remember in later elementary school the literal aches and pains my body felt as my I grew, and I realize, it was for a purpose.

                               

For me, some of the pains from the past two years were physical. Some made me weak physically, but as I gain that physical strength back, I realize how much stronger I have become emotionally.  I will tell you this: emotional growth does not mean you stop crying, you stop caring or you stop feeling. It means that your pains repair themselves easier. It is similar to the way an experienced long distance runner’s muscles repair themselves more quickly and easily the more they practice. There may be pain, but there is much reward.

In some ways I feel like these experiences have defined me, but I think it all began sometime nearly four years ago. As I sat in an open school hut in the heat of a Mozambican day, a woman told an incredible story of how in the midst of fear, she chose to love and forgive someone who had harmed her and it brought her so much healing. How this brought her to realize that everyday she must choose to love others, regardless of the circumstance. I said right then “that is what I want to do. I want to love others no matter what.”

A few days later as some friends and I were laying under a tree when a belligerent man carrying a weapon ran through the town chasing another man. In the area we were in, there was very little authority, and the main reason people didn’t harm one another was because they needed one another to survive. It wasn’t long before the man made his way back to where we were sitting, and he looked over and saw us. Immediately I began saying the word “peace” out loud repeatedly. And I prayed to myself “God, please help me love this person, because I am very afraid.”

The man threw the weapon, fell to his knees and laid his face on the floor. The only person with us who knew his language said “he is asking for help.” I laid my hand on his shoulder and began praying for him. Because of the possible risk we were in, we were asked to leave while some men came to help him. My adrenaline was going and my mind was having a hard time understanding what had just happened.

To be honest, even though the city I grew up in has a significant crime rate, I, myself, hadn’t experienced much more than a few fistfights. This event was quite significant to me. Something I couldn’t have even imagined. 

Fast forward a few months and I was back in Texas. I was back in the American workforce and feeling content with my job as a preschool teacher. Loving the little kids and trying to see the best in each child became my “ministry.” But at times the people in my life would make me angry and I definitely didn’t pray, “God help me love them.” It was more “God, get me away from them.” Real life situations would become hard and my prayer would be “God, fix this. Don’t make me deal with these crazy people.” Maybe not that exact prayer, but I can remember a few very similar.

When we found out we were pregnant, the excitement didn’t last for long as I was told only a week later that we had lost the baby. The thought of losing a child, for me, only lasted a week, though. We were one of the “misdiagnosed miscarriages” that happen more often than I had realized. But as I realized how many miscarriages were real, true miscarriages, my heart began to break. The pain that I felt for a week was something some mothers would mourn for a lot longer. Possibly a lifetime.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only time I was led to mourn the loss of our daughter. At 20 weeks my water broke and I was told that labor would come soon and I would have to deliver. The doctor asked if I wanted them to go ahead and deliver, but we said no. Six weeks later I still had not gone into labor, and was waiting on our daughter’s arrival in the hospital. Her delivery was an emergency and scary in so many ways, but it is still one of my fondest memories.

At some point during my pregnancy, I remembered those words “love no matter what.” Many times that is what kept me going.

And now, many times, it is what drives me. I began receiving so many requests to speak with or meet a mother who had just had a child early, or whose water broke significantly early. I was given a chance to share what our family had gone through and conquered. I got to choose joy over bitterness time and time again. And that made all the difference in how I began to heal.

Being so deep in a church culture where “full time ministry” is talked about so often, it is easy to focus on it being a job such as a pastor, worship pastor or missionary just to name a few titles. Each and every one of the people who hold such titles are incredibly important to the Body of Christ, but even more important is how they respond when the barista gets their order wrong at Starbucks.

In the past two years, more than ever I have realized that “full time ministry” is a choice. It is a choice to love no matter what. 

To hold the hand of the mother who seems to have it all together, but just wants to be vulnerable with someone and tell them she feels like she is falling apart. To help a family through a difficult diagnosis. To cry in your office with the woman who is trying to get her husband’s affairs in order after he has passed on. To be alert and notice that the reason a student of yours is acting out is because he is dealing with adult issues outside of school. To choose full time ministry and love no matter what in every single interaction of every single day.

If we can’t do these things on a day-to-day basis, what is the rest of it all for?