7th inning stretch

So, Chris & I have been thinking/talking a lot about our marriage lately.

We're in our 7th year and maybe it's because they say this is this time for the '7 year itch'.

Or because they say the hardest time of marriage is when you have small children.

Nothing to worry about- we actually feel like we've developed into a pretty good team and our marriage has grown in so many ways over the years.

But, we've had recent convictions on protecting our marriage.

My parents gave us the devotional, 'The Love Dare' for Christmas.

In the past, we have avoided the standardized mass-produced devotional material, (probably because we're so above it with our Bible college education- ha!)

but we decided to just do it.

(It can't hurt to focus on how we can love/serve each other better for a few minutes each day, right?)

So, as God usually does, I'm reading a book that has nothing to do with marriage but got blindsided by a passage that pertains to what I've been thinking.

The writer is talking about the depths of love for his wife, but the 'realness' as well.

"My wife is Eve, the first woman. She's the one created for me because God saw that it was not good for me to be alone. All creation might parade before me; I might know it and name it, but no one else besides her is suitable for me. She is the one taken out of me, broken out of my side, the part of me I lose only to gain back a millionfold; bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She is the one I join to. She is the one I seek to stand naked with and feel no shame.

Yet she is the one I also know as sinner, eater of the forbidden fruit, and who knows me this way. She is the one who, rather than standing naked with me feeling no shame, covers her nakedness before me, as I do before her. She is the one who, with me and yet against me, hides from God. She is the one I blame for my troubles...she is the one who resents me for her travail...She is Eve.

And she is my Rachel and my Leah together. She is the one I worked seven years for, and my love for her was such that those years were like a day. And finally, the day of being united as one arrived. We celebrated, and we went to our tent. But in the morning-maybe not the first one, but some morning-I awoke and beside me was not Rachel, but Leah: a woman I didn't know, didn't choose, a stranger. She had been switched. I had been duped. Could I learn to love the one I hadn't chosen?"

-Mark Buchanan from, 'Your God is Too Safe.'

This really made me think: who am I as a wife?

Am I the same girl that Chris pursued and proposed to?

Am I the same woman he pictured as the mother of his children when we dreamed about these years so many years ago?

And the hardest question is: have I grown into something better?

Looking back on those years of courtship- we really did put our best-selves forward.

We had noble aspirations of what we wanted our marriage to be like.

So here we are in the middle of year 7.

With God's grace, we're not doing so bad.

But I want to be his Rachel- the one he sacrificed for, not the one he settles for.