My Love Letter to Stephen on our 21st Wedding Anniversary

What do you think about when you look at me?

I know we're not the fairytale you dreamed we'd be

You wore the veil, you walked the aisle, you took my hand

And we dove into a mystery…

Dear Stephen, 


Twenty one years ago I offered  you my fragile heart, trusting that the God who had led each of us through a season of brokenness, might create something whole and beautiful in our union.  We claimed the verse “Each of us – a half – incomplete, together we are as one” and marveled that we fit so perfectly…


As this particular wedding anniversary has drawn closer, the theme of brokenness has pursued me relentlessly.  Everywhere I turned, there has been a song or a quote or a tangible reminder of how frail and transient our dreams, possessions and our very lives can be.  


Just a few months after our honeymoon, we were working multiple jobs, while you juggled night classes and I endured morning sickness.  Our perfectly fitted hearts began to feel the strain.  Now and then a piece would break off, and we’d both be startled by the pain caused by a jagged edge.  Frantically, I grasped for the fragments..  I would hold tightly to that piece of a dream that was fading, a scrap of identity I was losing, those aspirations that used to give me purpose, and the sense of control that was slipping through my fingers. 

How I wish we could go back to simpler times

Before all our scars and all our secrets were in the light…

It's going to take much more than promises this time

Only God can change our minds

When baby after baby joined our family, I found myself scrambling to pick up even more broken pieces, convinced that by sheer willpower I could fix our children’s little hearts and shield them from the disillusionment and pain of living in such a broken world.  As their mother, I felt the need to disguise my own vulnerability and weakness.   


It’s funny that it was a line from a TV drama that caught my attention, exposing these impossible expectations I tended to hold for myself.  In a recent episode of “The Crown,”  Queen Elizabeth was confronted by her sister, Margaret, who warned, “… You cannot flinch, because if you show a single crack, we’ll see it isn’t a crack, but a chasm, and we’ll all fall in. So you must hold it all together.”  As a mother of 9, I understood that kind of pressure and began to wonder whether I was doing my children a disservice by making such a valiant effort to “hold everything together”  and how much good I was actually accomplishing?


Over the past two decades, we have learned by necessity to hold our earthly treasures  loosely, especially since our destructive duo, Baxter and Cade, came on the scene.  Ever since they learned to sprint at ten months, these little twins have left a path of destruction in their wake and broken everything from ceiling fans, expensive doors, and furniture to our HVAC system.  I try to convince myself that someday their Picasso-style artwork on our freshly painted walls and new carpets will evoke feelings nostalgia, rather than nausea.


I’ve also recalled the myriad of repairs we’ve faced in each of our eight dwelling places, the countless broken appliances and more vehicles than I care to count.  Everything from our first car which was crushed in an “act of God” to the three commuter vehicles which failed on us this past week and the recent crash which came so close to devastating our family.


Again and again, I have been humbled by reminders of our fragility…
Several weeks ago, when these thoughts began to swirl around in my head and bring me down, I read about an ancient style of Japanese art called Kintsugi, where cracked pieces of pottery are repaired with gold.  Sometimes the pottery will intentionally be broken, since these repaired pieces are rendered even more valuable than their originals.  
No sooner did I read this, than I recalled something I had heard about the meaning of the word “sincerity.”  

In his online article, “Live and Love Without Wax, Jon Bloom writes the following:   According to folk history, the……English word sincere comes from two Latin words: sine (without) and cera (wax). In the ancient world, dishonest merchants would use wax to hide defects, such as cracks, in their pottery so that they could sell their merchandise at a higher price. More reputable merchants would hang a sign over their pottery — sine cera (without wax) — to inform customers that their merchandise was genuine.¹ 

 He continues by claiming, “I’m no etymological expert. But I have witnessed plenty of misleading marketing by mendacious merchants in my time. So the explanation seems plausible to me.  I mean, is there not a lot of ‘wax’ hiding a lot of defects all around us…Multiply me by seven billion and you get a real mess of a world. The serpent gave Eve the ‘wax treatment’ in the Garden and we’ve been ‘waxing’ our wares for each other ever since…[We] Christians have nothing left to hide. We have no reason to wax ourselves to impress others. There is no one more impressive than Jesus. And he’s the one we want everyone else to see. Our sins are gone and our weaknesses serve to show how gloriously powerful Jesus is… Wax would simply cover up his glory.”


My despair turns to hopefulness when I realize that these faults I want to hide can remind me that my Creator, The Master Artist and wise Potter, is still working on me and on our marriage and our family.  Through all of these disappointments and setbacks, He is piecing us together and filling the cracks with gold to reflect His grace in our home..  


Stephen, we have spent more than two decades laughing, crying, rejoicing, grieving, holding on tenaciously to what matters most and relinquishing everything that’s left.   When I consider the husband you’ve been to me, I thank God for the man who cheerfully exchanged his personal interests and ambitions for two decades of sleepless nights and overtime to provide for our family.   It’s funny that the memories I treasure most are not the handful of times we’ve sipped wine over candlelit dinners but the countless times you’ve brought me strong coffee in the wee hours of the morning .  The hundreds of mornings you’ve sat with me while I’ve nursed our babies or read to me by flashlight.   Thank you for loving and caring for me (broken pieces and all) for these 21 years.

Maybe you and I were never meant to be complete

Could we just be broken together?

If you can bring your shattered dreams and I'll bring mine

Could healing still be spoken and save us?

The only way we'll last forever is broken together (Casting Crowns)