I never put much thought into what biblical marriage looked like until right before Nicholas and I got married. Really before I met Nicholas, marriage was just something else that I wanted to check off my todo list. Marriage was just another milestone that I was expected to go through. If I didn’t get married, I would never have the kids I dreamed of, and because I never married I would be alone forever.
This is the lie that society tells us. “If you don’t live out the American dream, you will never be truly happy.” Society tells us that if we never get married, we will never be able to find joy elsewhere. Society also tells us, that marriage is also just a piece of paper or another thing to write off on your taxes. Society tells us that there is no point in getting married because, in less than two years, you will just get divorced. Our fallen culture paints such a poor picture of marriage for us that it has completely buried the beauty of marriage that we find in Scripture.
When asking myself what I learned during the first year of my marriage, I find myself struggling for words. Not that there is a lack of words coming to my mind, but that there is so much to say. I never pictured that in our first year of marriage there would be a tornado, ripping through town in the middle of the night. Destroying our town and most importantly to us, our church. In our first year of marriage, we never would have thought that a global pandemic would happen. We never pictured that said global pandemic would cause me to lose a new job and then quarantined us to our apartment for months. I never would have thought that I would have a collection of masks to try and match with my outfits. There are so many things that Nicholas and I pictured doing in our first year of marriage that we didn’t get to do.
There are so many things that have been uncertain in the last six months of our marriage. Yet from it, so many blessings. We truly saw the Lord do a great work this last year in our marriage and in our lives. The first seven months of our marriage were so great! We fell in love with a church, both loved our jobs, and fell in love with the city where we lived. Things were great and they only seemed to be getting better!
Then, the tornado struck our town and our church. Soon to follow, COVID shut everything down. I lost my job, Nicholas was working from home, and for months we were confined to our apartment. Things in our marriage (and our day to day lives) looked so different and we had no warning. When everything happened in March, we really had to rely on God more than we ever expected to in our first year of marriage. When I hear myself say that, it sounds so awful. I hate hearing myself say that. But that was our reality, well at least mine.
I love what Abby talked about in her post earlier this week, about biblical dating! Even more, I loved when she said, “it can be quite easy to put a significant other before God” I would even change that and say, it can be quite easy to put our comfort before God. I felt that I began to get so comfortable with our routine that I was almost just floating through each week. Not that I wasn’t spending time on my own with God. But if our week looked different than the week before, I would almost question it.
Now, we have been doing this COVID and post-tornado thing for a while, we have really noticed how much we have grown in our faith and our marriage. We were confined to our tiny apartment for months. One of the first things that I got told before we got married was that “you never truly understand how selfish you are as a person until you get married”. I’m not sure that a truer statement has even been said.
Looking back at the last six months, we were stuck in that tiny space for a long time. Not only did we have to rely on God more than ever, but we really were forced to get to know each other even more and at a deeper level. We prayed more, studied together, and really saw the fruit of all of that through a rough and uncertain time.
God allowed us the opportunity to pour into a smaller group of friends from church, allowed us to serve in ministries in our community together, and truly allowed us to see the beauty of serving God with your spouse by your side. Abby spoke on Matthew 22:36-39 earlier, and we did not plan to both bring up this verse either. My favorite part about quarantine was getting to live out these verses with my husband by my side!
I am grateful that God placed these challenges in front of us during the first year of marriage. I fell in love with my husband and Jesus so much more than I ever anticipated just in the first year. I truly believe that when you follow God with your spouse, Satan will try to intervene. Trust me, there were times where we struggled. There were times where our doubts controlled our minds and we questioned what we were going to do. But we did not let those thoughts control our actions. We continued to trust Christ in all of the uncertainties that this season brought us. We continued to pray more fervently than ever before! We have seen the Lord’s goodness to us over the last six months and we cannot wait to continue to see His goodness in the years to come!
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