eight years

Today is our 8 year anniversary. 8 years. From today until next year’s anniversary, we doing every day on the calendar for the 9th time as Mr. and Mrs. I remember when we hadn’t been married even a year, and I worked with a young woman who’d been married 4 years. To me, at that time, she had been married forever!! And here we are, eight years behind us.

In our seventh year, we never could have imagined what our eighth year would hold. Though, we probably have said that to each other every year we’ve been married. For some reason, now that all those other years are behind us, and our 8th year the most recent lived, the other years seem more predictable than the last year. I don’t know. Last year was pretty big too. My husband starting a new business and all. Ok, it was epic. But this year involved new things on another kind of level. The going back to school kind of level. The starting a new church kind of level. Watching his business grow and grow and GROW level!

God is good. I’m looking back on eight years married to the greatest love and friend of my life, and I see God written all over it. From our first fun meeting at the county fair 13 or so years ago, to the incredibly fun and flirtatious next few weeks and months we had getting to know each other and subsequently falling in love, to the ways God used Garrett to grow me up in the next several years, the ways He used Garrett to make me consider an art degree, the way he gave me a man who is an artist himself, the ways God gave me a man with more common sense wisdom than about anyone I’ve eve known, to the way God gave me a man who puts up with my garbage and still loves me at the end of the day, to the way God had us journey to parenthood, the way he’s an incredible daddy to our boys, and to the way he’s a phenomenal helper and partner through all of our life together.

Last night we tried something new. Since I had been gone the whole week prior, distracted with the preparations for my paren’ts surprise 60th birthday party in another state, I hadn’t gotten him a card. And he, though he had picked one up, hadn’t taken a moment to write on it yet. To me, after 8 years, it’s ok that our cards weren’t ready FOR our anniversary. In fact, that fact will just prolong our celebration. But, since the card is the most important part of any gift or celebration to this woman, we did something new. We decided to say our cards to each other last night. What we would have written down to each other, we said out loud in stead. I don’t know… other than not having a permanent record about our hearts for each other at this very time in our lives, I might suggest we forego the written card altogether and stick to the spoken card. It may very well have been our sweetest moment all year.

After my (too wordy of course) card was composed and out there for him, he, faced me and said in fewer words MORE than I said in all of mine. He said, “Katie, you are my axis. My world revolves around you. I would be completely lost without you.” He did say more than that. But, with tears streaming down my cheek, I got it. Totally got it. Because he is my axis too. Our lives our so intertwined, that we are a double, parallel axis’ around which our world’s neatly and sloppily rotate. We would be lost without each other. In just a few years, we’ll have been together for half of our lives, and we can’t really remember life without the other in it anymore.

Garrett is not God to me. God is God to me. But Garrett is the single greatest treasure (earth side) the Lord has given me. And I don’t take him for granted. Never really have. And I love him wildly and even madly sometimes. If you are my axis, then God is our force of gravity. He brought us together. And He, alone, holds us together. He makes us spin. And He is the reason we have any grounding. It’s all in Him. I love you precious man.

xox,

Katie