Sixty-Four Seventy-Five

The last four weeks have been intensely chaotic, full of frustration and full of reward. There is a part of me that seems to think that all I have to show for this painful period has been the hard-earned $64.75 from my yard sale on Saturday. But what I can honestly say is that I have much more than that.
I'm thinking of the whole concept of receiving beauty for ashes right now, because it seems so appropriate to this past month for me. I have learned more about myself, about my God, about my husband, and about life in the last four weeks than I have in a long time. And I realized something. My marriage had been reduced to ashes. As much as it is not easy to admit, I was the arsenist. I am not assuming full responsibility for the failure of my marriage, but I was definitely the one who struck the match.
At the beginning of this month, I left my husband. I had no idea what I wanted or who I was or where I was headed. I just went to my parents house. And let me stop here and say something about parents who love too much. My mother used to have this book that had a silent impact on me because I never read anything beyond the title "Women who love too much." I don't know if I ever felt when I was growing up that my parents were people who loved us too much, but I believe it is true as I look back.
I don't say this of my folks in order to pass judgment on them, I say it as a statement of the obvious. I think my parents greatly value their children, and I am no exclusion from that rule. In their love and acceptance, I found a safe retreat from the frustrations of my marriage. I struck the match here, burned several bridges and ran to their arms and away from my husband's.
Going to my parents' home was like trying to take a nap on an inverted pincushion. I told my father repeatedly that I did not want to be there. The nettles that I felt so poignantly at their house were not of their creation, but of mine and of a God who instead of loving me too much, loved me perfectly and knew that the appropriate place for me was not in the home of my parents, but in the home of my husband.
Coming home to my husband two weeks later was not easy. I feared that I would return to a pile of ash and rubble - evidence of the significant breech in faith that I had created by my rash behavior. Instead I found something totally unexpected (to me) - that God had been working on my behalf to replace my ashes with beauty.
I am experiencing the honeymoon that I dreamed of from the beginning, in a marriage that I had not only nearly lost hope in, but one that I had also intentionally sabotaged out of my frustration. What I discovered in the midst of thinking that my marriage was for my benefit only was that my marriage, like everything else in my life, was soli deo gloria - all for the glory of God.
The concept is so basic, but from the moment I began to focus on all of the voices in my life (often including my own) that led me to alternately question and defend my views of marriage, and more specifically my marriage, I began to lose focus on the purpose of my marriage in the first place.
My hope is restored, my commitment renewed, my vision refreshed and my troth plighted (faith pledged) to my husband and my God once more. I have a great deal of work to do to rebuild the burned bridges I left in the wake of my leaving, but in the midst of this work, I have something to hold onto - out of the ashes God has recreated in His image a marriage that I was trying to conform to my image. This amateur arsenist has exchanged her matchbook for the building blocks of God's word on marriage. I hope to use this blog as a place to chronicle what I learn. Maybe others will be able to use it in some way to encourage them on the days when all they see is a pile of ashes where a marriage once was...