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hisbeautysurroundsus · 4 months

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How-two Become One

It takes a village—several villages and a flood. A happy marriage is not the product of one soul wandering boundlessly through the cosmos until it unavoidably bounces into its always-meant-to-be life-pairing. It makes for a good story, but that is not what happens in real life. A good story is not built on good things. Conflict drives a storyline. But conflict is not our story.

Our love is everything that went right, all of our life’s work and most intense passions, and yet altogether none of our doing. It is everything we ever wanted but never realized was possible until we had it. Our story is about what went right in a union, but the line between faith, fate, and serendipity is unclear.

How to have a happy marriage can be confusing because there is no how-to; sometimes, two people just make perfect sense together. I am writing about my true love, my life partner of twenty-seven years, because that is what writers do, even if we cannot do the story justice.

Every story needs an emotional arc, some conflict overcome, some redemption, or a great lesson learned by the main character. What if none of that is true? What if something just made sense from the beginning, two people so perfectly matched that there is no great conflict to overcome? What if the main characters of the story learned nothing from their journey, there was no great redemption because they were so right for each other from the start? No one wants to read that story.

I am writing our story as if my wife will not read it, as if my writing ability will in no way reflect the measure of my affection for her (even though she proofreads all my work). I am usually a logical person, not easily rattled. Level-headed is how 98.6% of people would describe me. But putting our love and happiness, our story, onto the page is bewildering. I suppose it is best to start with our beginning. That would take us back to the village.

I have come to know that not all long marriages are happy marriages. The length of a marriage is not proportional to the love shared; the two are not mutually inclusive, nor do they have to be mutually exclusive. My earliest recollection of love and marriage, separate from the long line of long (not necessarily happy) marriages I witnessed in my family, was when I overheard my mother’s morning prayers as a boy.

My mother prayed that God would intervene in my life and help me find a helpmate, someone I could be happy with and share a happy life with. She did not pray for a long marriage; she prayed for a happy one. She prayed that God would prepare me a wife and that I would have the character to wait until he brought us together before I gave my heart to another. I also remember our pastor calling all the teenagers down to the altar and praying over us, that we would be attentive to God’s plan for our lives in selecting a life partner. My wife recalls that her parents prayed the same thing for her. My parents in Florida, hers in Mississippi, our churches, in this way, it takes a village.

I made early attempts at love; we both did, but they failed. They did not fail so much as they never really got off the ground. The thought of how different our lives would be should we have paired with earlier versions of what we thought could be love now feels like a glass on the edge of a table over a marble floor. The what-ifs of a life not lived together elicit a cringe of catastrophe deep in my gut. What if we never were? As I reflect on the first time we met, the feeling of fragility permeates every small happenchance that led to that unlikely meeting in the Wool Market Baptist Church gym.

It was May 1995, and I was a young Airman in the US Air Force. My first assignment following technical training was to Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi. My boss was a member of the local American Red Cross disaster response team, and he was called to assist victims of the Little Biloxi River flood in Biloxi, Mississippi. The week before he departed, a family emergency left him unable to fulfill his duties. He asked me if I would consider attending a course in operating an Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV) and filling in for him at the flood. I reluctantly accepted because that is what is expected when a Technical Sergeant gives an Airman a “volunteer” opportunity. He informed me that I would have to take leave to assist, of which I only had two weeks built up, making the decision even harder. I decided to go.

Following a crash course on caring for disaster victims, I drove our team to Biloxi. We immediately started preparing meals and stockpiling cleanup supplies in the Wool Market Baptist Church gym. My job was to deliver food and cleanup supplies to those impacted by the flood. After a few days, one of my fellow ERV drivers said that there was another American Red Cross volunteer that I had to meet. He introduced me to my future wife, Rebekah, at the relief center in the gym at Wool Market Baptist Church.

We briefly said hello, and nothing was particularly spectacular about that first encounter. We agreed to meet that night for a group dinner and to discuss our business. Rebekah and I talked at dinner, and even though she was beautiful, I felt she was too young at four years my junior. Over the next few days, we talked in between deliveries and at dinner with the group. She was different, not like any girl I had ever dated. We were kindred spirits from the start. Every conversation came easy. We were of like faith, had similar likes and dislikes, and seemed to be heading in the same direction.

Following the relief efforts, we spoke on the phone every night, sometimes for hours. Never, not once, have we ever stopped talking. We were instantly friends, though it was not immediately apparent that we would be more than that. She was a Christian, confident, and yet unassuming and humble. Other girls had played games, but she did not. She was just the person I thought she was. Although I know her much more intimately now, my initial assessment has not changed in the twenty-seven years we have spent together since. We quickly became best friends.

After some months of talking on the phone and a few brief visits, it became apparent that there was much more to our relationship. I felt confident that God had brought us together and that this was the person I wanted to marry. We dated for two and a half years and married in September 1997. As I look back on it, a thousand small things had to align for us to meet: our parents, the flood, my boss, the training, my leave, the introduction by a friend—so many small things perfectly ordered for our marriage of twenty-seven years to get off the ground. Only God can do that.

Since we were married, our two separate lives have become one. We have traveled the world with my military career, living overseas for twenty-three years. We spent our first three years in Germany before the internet became widely available. With no phone, no television service in English, and no family interference, we played board games and spent our evenings talking around the table. We made blanket tents draped over couch cushions in the living room and watched movies on the VCR all weekend. We learned to work through all our challenges together and to rely on each other in God. We shared one vehicle, which meant we went nearly everywhere together. We traveled all over Europe on a shoestring budget. We held hands. We fell in love. We built a life together. We became each other’s everything.

With twelve military assignments, nine overseas, we saw the world together. I was busy with my career and education, so Rebekah did most of our travel research. I saw the world through her eyes as she meticulously curated each trip to maximize our shared experience. We kissed under the Eifel Tower in Paris, climbed Mt. Fuji in Japan, scuba-dived the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, trekked across the Alps in New Zealand, and ate bulgogi in Seoul. She showed me the best sites in over thirty countries, and as I reflect on all our shared travel experiences, I know that they were only great because we were there together.

We experienced tragedy and disappointment, but never—not once—was our marriage in jeopardy. We went through the loss of loved ones and all the challenges of life together. We were strong going into these challenges and stronger yet because we overcame them together. The challenges were never between us; they were always external to our marriage. Her strengths complemented my weaknesses, and vice versa. I knew she always looked out for my best interest and vice versa. We had each other’s backs. There was no competition between us; we were on the same team. Her success meant my success, and my success meant her success. A win for either of us meant a win for both. We loved each other wholeheartedly. We built no walls between us. We risked everything on this one chance at true, uninhibited love.

We are known as R&r (Rus & Rebekah) by most. When I was promoted into leadership positions later in my military career, she was right there with me, caring for the unit’s spouses and families. We not only survived the pressures of a military marriage, we thrived in it together. We taught Sunday school together in churches all around the world. We led youth groups, kids that now have kids of their own, on nearly every continent. We have children all around the world, even though after many years of trying, we were never able to have kids of our own.

Sometimes, while road-tripping in the truck or sitting on the garage-patio looking out at the mountains, we may not say a word for a significant length of time. We are content to just be in each other’s presence. We enjoy pretenseless quiet with a comfort only earned through thirty years of great conversations. Then, as if with some unheard cue, we both speak about the same thing simultaneously. We smile knowingly as one of us yields to the other to say what we are both thinking. We voice a private conversation we were already having in our collective subconscious. Our conversational patterns, and likely our thought patterns, have become one. Time does that.

Some military assignments were five years, while others were only one year. She made our house a home as we moved from continent to continent. She transformed each apartment or house into a comfortable, familiar place. She could condense our belongings and keepsakes from a two-story home into a two-bedroom apartment. She made all of our things fit neatly, then expanded it back out when we moved back into a house. She kept our lives balanced. A change in our house did not mean a change in our home.

When, in retirement, I announced to her that God was leading me to be a writer, she said she was happy to accompany me on this next chapter of our journey together. Our story does not have the elements of a good narrative because it has always reflected God’s abundant and unmerited goodness to us. Our life has been nothing short of grand; we have lived every experience together, yet we can take no credit for the outcome. I cannot pass along some excellent marriage advice because no lessons were learned the hard way. Our story contains none of the elements of a grand tale. We were just us from the beginning. We knew that we would share the rest of our lives together from the start. We knew we would finish what we started because that is what we both do. Our story has no great ending because we are still living it. Yet our story is the one I must write, even if my limited skill in the craft could never capture the grandeur of the life we shared.

I snapped this pic on The Grand Traverse, a Great Walk on the South Island of New Zealand.

#god #nature #beauty #mountains #optoutside #faith #new zealand

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