I wrote this on my lovewithacapitall.com site, but I’ve changed my mind and will share it with you, too, with some minor changes. It’s about the ministry of my life and the Angel, which have, at the very least, some overlap. There isn’t any separation in our lives, all of us is spiritual. I heard once, “we’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, we’re spiritual beings having a human experience,” and that’s pretty much accurate. (As Google tells me, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said it. I don’t know who he is, but he’s right at least once, in this regard.) I called it 23 there, and I wouldn’t call it 23 anymore, now I call it Great Big Walking Eyeballs. I hope you like it, and it has some value to you:

Last time, we talked about “having it all” or living a “best life.” This week was my 23rd wedding anniversary, so maybe I should have mentioned that. 

I’m a simple man, and that’s a very good thing, because my life and ministry is primarily to climb into complicated, chaotic situations. Work, for me, is connection/relationships and doing the best I can to bring peace and hope into anxious, hopeless, sometimes wildly unstable spaces. This is work, but the thing about having identical personal & vocational missions is there’s no division between on and off. I don’t really have days off. But I don’t want them, either. To me, this is purpose, and it’s heavy and keeps me up lots of nights, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. 

However, the truth is, I couldn’t do it at all if my home & marriage wasn’t a place of physical, emotional, spiritual rest. It’s very difficult to step into the drama of others when your life is dramatic. There’s simply not enough left to fully engage with the storms others are facing when we’re exhausted with our own raging storms. If I’m being punched in the face, it’s harder to notice your fight, much less come to your aid. 

This brings me to the Angel. She’s calm and easy. It’s 23 years but sometimes feels like 100, but, at other times, feels like I met her yesterday. I don’t know what 23 years feels like, or should feel like, but what I know is that I am completely, totally open with her (as the Bible says, “naked and unashamed”), but I also get butterflies when I kiss her, just like the first time.

I told her last night, that I very often focus (at least out loud) on the ‘lover’ aspect of our relationship. I very often tell her how oevrwhelmingly foxy she is, and how 23 years of marriage has done nothing to dull my attraction to her. So, on a public pie chart, that’s the biggest piece. But on the one no one sees, the pie chart of my heart, it’s probably a smaller piece than the rest. She’s Proverbs 31. She’s my best friend, my partner, an inspiration and model for living a life of faith. She gives strength by simply being who she is in a world that isn’t always kind to the beautiful ones. Kind, merciful, the best mother to her sons and mentor to the rest of the people lucky enough to be in her orbit. She’s creative and confident, capable, talented, driven, brilliant, gifted hand over fist by her Creator. Did I mention knock-down gorgeous? How staggering is it that when thinking/speaking about the best looking woman in the world, her looks aren’t anywhere close to the best thing about her? We’ve built a calm life from the ground up, so that we can walk anywhere, enter into any circumstance, because this soft, loving home is waiting to refill all we’ve lost outside.

We make choices, right? The best choices feel easy & obvious in retrospect, but upon further inspection, require days and years of building. The path to our particular marriage and home is marked with uncomfortability and perseverance (only Heaven knows how many arguments and sleepless nights this path has contained, so far), where it might have been easier to check out (in whatever form “checking out” takes) than to keep building. “Having it all” certainly isn’t easy, and it has lots and lots of exit ramps, but those obstacles don’t make it less of a blessing. Maybe they make it more. More significant, more valuable, more our own. 

I have no idea why she’d marry someone like me, but I don’t care about that. It’s her problem, not mine. My responsibility in all of this is to remain grateful, with wide open eyes to this amazing life I’ve been given.

Maybe that’s as good of a life philosophy as we can find, when it comes to religion, faith, and grace. There isn’t really a why to answer, “Why me? Why us?” But that’s not for us. Our responsibility in all of this is to remain grateful, with wide open eyes to these amazing gifts (life, forgiveness, righteousness, salvation, 2nd life, resurrection, each other, the Church, the church, love, acceptance, belonging, talents, passions, love, more love, all the love) we’ve been given. Like great big walking eyeballs full of thankful tears.