Let me start by saying, we are less than 6 months away from the wedding. I am 105 emotions deep and knowing that the wedding is so close is as exciting as it is terrifying. It was almost as if the day we got engaged, time suddenly went into overdrive and here we are now in our wedding year.
I'm very blessed to have great women who have ministered to me during my engagement. I've been spending a lot of time with one of these women recently. She's very important to me, among many reasons, because since day 1 she has understood and accepted me for my past and all that has come with it. She knows more about me than most people do and the relationship I have with her is one I really cherish. She's a wife and a mom and a great friend to me. She shares all of the advice and guidance she can about marriage with me and recently she told me something along the lines of "after the wedding.. you'll just be another couple.. after you have kids.. you'll just be another set of parents and eventually just another family". This is so true. Here I am in the heart of one of the most eventful times of my life and in the snap of a finger the spotlight will redirect to the next engaged couple and we will just be, married.
What is most interesting is that as an engaged couple it is so easy to get caught up in what we're going to do for the day of, what's the dress going to look like, real or fake flowers, DJ or band, any little people in the wedding? and the list goes on, but Cameron and I have tried our hardest not to be naive about what's really ahead. Because after the I Dos, the first dance and the honeymoon, we will be smack dab into our first year of marriage. July 14th will absolutely be a day that we will remember, but it is only one day of the rest of our lives.
Let's face it, anyone who has ever been in a relationship knows that it's hard. I've talked about it before that there have been stages of our relationship where I didn't think we'd make it, but we did. These hardships don't disappear once the rings are on both fingers. I know marriage will be hard. The odds are stacked against us, we come from families with a lot of divorces and heartache. The most clarity that has been brought to us is our ability to recognize this at our age and stage of our lives together. God has been so good to us in helping us have these hard conversations that neither of us really want to have.
This is why having mentors and pre-marriage counseling has really been the most important part of this whole planning process. It helps when others notice this. Just the other day a friend told me, "most of the time I'm so against couples our age getting married, but not with you - you're being so smart about this". It's uplifting to know that while we will never plan as much as we want to we are truly investing time into making our marriage successful before the wedding. So yes, eventually we will just be another married couple, but I hope that someday we can be the ones ministering to others the same way our mentors have invested in us.
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