This morning, hubby had a very early meeting. He snuck out, let me sleep in, and awoke at almost seven to the sound of my cell phone ringing in an odd place…I stumbled out of bed to find it here, just like this. Thank you, wonderful Husband, for the beautiful flowers and for 14 of the best years of my life!

Fourteen years ago today we stood…dressed in finest, surrounded by flowers, and wearing secret Converse sneakers, and we promised to love each other for the rest of our lives.

And now, here at this point I then thought so far in the distance… these years have brought us three children, have brought us change, have taken us places we never imagined going. These years have been scattered with hardship, with joy, with laughter, with tears, with much and little and health and sickness and riches and poverty and all the things that the vows we took that day promised they would bring.

If you had told me that day I would be more in love with him 14 years later, I would not have thought that possible…. and yet I know now that it is. Love surprises us with its ability to grow, with its flexibility, with its bearing the burden of many things and being richer with every passing day. Love bears all things, and when you love in Christ it takes all things and makes them new, makes them into something as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and stronger than tempered steel. I am blessed every moment by my husband’s love for me, by power of it.

And I know now a little about how the two can become one flesh, by the math that defies logic but proves itself again and again…that 1 + 1 + One = 1, and the closer we move to the One that gives us love the closer knit we become, the stronger the tie that bonds us. He is the shared electron that makes two atoms into one, a new thing unlike either element.

My love, happy anniversary! I do rejoice in our love, and after all these years you take may breath away just like you did that first summer. And every year gets better….