Happy Anniversary, Jana

This past weekend, my beautiful and wife celebrated (?) our 11th anniversary. The celebration was in question because we spent the day cleaning the upstairs of our house which we’re waiting to move back into after the flooding in Nashville. In the chaos of the flood, there were mismatched shoes, half-opened boxes, and albums scattered all over the top story. We hadn’t taken the time to sort through and organize the stuff since it was all piled up there the day of the flood.

Real romantic, huh?

Not to excuse myself, but I think that day is an interesting picture of our life together thus far. In the past 11 years, we’ve weathered a few storms. A parent diagnosed with rapid onset Parkinson’s disease with severe dementia. A sister with thyroid cancer. A brother with multiple brain surgeries and difficult recoveries. A flooded home in one of the worst non-hurricane disasters in the history of the US. A child with leukemia. In truth, it’s felt like some months / years, we’ve just trudged through the waters.

But Jana is an uncommonly strong woman. She’s never – NEVER – checked out. Not emotionally. Not physically. Not spiritually. She’s had her questions of the Lord, true, but they’ve all been asked in the way such questions should be asked: Built on a foundation of faith, spoken from a posture of humility.

And through it all, the most intoxicating sound in my life continues to be my wife’s laugh. The one where she’s really laughing; not the one where she’s just humoring me. We have laughed together at the most inopportune times, cried together at random, and on our anniversary, we packed boxes. But we did it together.

I’m thankful to the Lord today, too, to live life beside a woman who even now is battling a stomach bug that has infiltrated 3 children under 7, while living in a home that is not our own. I sit in my quasi-comfy desk chair while she cleans up a steady stream of you-know-what.

What an amazing woman. What an amazing friend. What a daily reminder of God’s grace in my life.