OK. Time to catch up a bit...what else is new?! We celebrated our 11th anniversary on March 18th. We were able to go away for the weekend to A Weekend to Remember, a Family Life marriage conference. It was fantastic!! What a weekend! God knew just what we needed, of course.
I have been looking forward to this conference for 2 years. We went once when we were newlyweds, and I was sensing it was time to go again as it's a great way to retreat and spend deliberate, fun time on the marriage. Well, I lined it all up and then had to cancel because Bob had a work implementation that weekend that wasn't going to change. I canceled the "babysitter" and hotel room and found friends to take our reserved spot at the conference. 9 days before the conference, Bob found out that his implementation had been postponed. (This is the first time this has ever happened for him!) So, I began to see if God was going to open doors for us to be able to go; He was going to have to work it all out as the chances of there still being a hotel room available and somebody to watch the kids all weekend were slim. But, it all came together (and the couple who graciously "gave back" our tickets ended up able to attend for free!).
We really needed this getaway to focus on us. A year ago, Mom gave me a pretty little tin with a note in it that said our anniversary gift was that she was going to pray for us in our marriage every day of the year. How wise that was! The aftermath of our year of cancer and chemo had reared its ugly face over the year. I have to say that I didn't see this coming as I had thought that the year of fatigue, sickness, healing from surgeries, and adjusting to lots of new changes was when we would really "feel it". However, God so graciously gave us strength and maintained our marriage during incredible stress, and grief. This last year was sort of like once we started to try to adapt back to life and rediscover "normal", our relationship was more susceptible to tension and lacking closeness. I've thought some of the causes of this kind of struggle might have been 1. expectations of one another (whereas during our hard year, we had to be very flexible with one another), 2. adjusting to changes that were more permanent rather than temporary (temporary being things like my not having any hair, my parents living with us, etc.), 3. needing to re-establish good habits in place of habits that had allowed us to cope with our situation. Regardless, it's been a year of growing pains and victories, and I was so thankful to have the weekend to reflect on our relationship's strengths and weaknesses as well as enjoy each others company. What a treasure!
NOTE: We highly recommend the Weekend to Remember for ANY married couple...the format is conducive to laughing, learning, thinking about and sharing answers to interesting questions with one another, and spending one-on-one time together.
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