This morning, I woke up depressed. Before I had even opened my eyes, I felt crushed by disappointments, exhaustion and the general weight of daily responsibilities.
These are the moments where I choose.
I choose to lean in and deal with whatever is going on inside of my heart and mind. Or I choose to flee from them, numbing myself with TV, daily tasks or anything within reach, really.
It’s easier to run.
Yet I cannot run as I once did. Not with my husband next to me in this journey of life.
Marriage is a glorious and difficult daily process. I love the man I married more than anyone else on this earth. But truthfully, I want to hide from him as much as I want to hide from every other person in my life. Sometimes even more so.
The day-in-and-day-out process of bearing your heart and revealing your weaknesses to another human being can be brutally difficult.
Yet the urge to flee vulnerability threatens to destroy the only thing my broken heart truly desires.
Because I want to be known–as I imagine all people want to be known. I desire my husband to know everything about me and to still choose to love me every day for the rest of our lives.
This is why marriage so deeply reflects the nature of God.
While I’ve long known in my mind that God loves me and delights in me as His child, my heart has been slow to accept this truth from Scripture.
This truth, it seems, has only been grasped in my life by fully engaging in consistent vulnerability.
More than anyone else in my life, my husband has taught me this.
As I consistently unpack my brokenness, hurt and failings before him, he consistently reveals the love of God to me. Because whatever I seem to unpack, he keeps choosing me. And even more, he delights in me.
This is love.
For God does not merely tolerate us, heaving exasperated sighs when we confess our sins and our failings. He runs to meet us in our repentance and brokenness. Often He pursues us before we even arrive! Our God is quick to forgive and even quicker to remind us of how precious we are in His eyes.
This is the love of God I desire to sing about–the fierce, tender, unyielding love that bends our knees and sears our hearts with its holiness. Love so deep our hearts ache upon receiving it, realizing we are so unworthy and yet so accepted as His children.
This is His love. The love that I desire most and yet am so quick to flee.
May He help me to stop running, every day, for the rest of my life.
Unshaken Joy 