Hello, internet…

Hello, internet.  And blog.  Look, I still exist.  And I have things to write burbling around in me, but I’m still recovering from school (that will be a post soonish, once I have enough distance to process the year) and, oh yeah.  I’m getting married on Saturday.  

Married.

Married like my parents are married.  27 years of married, for them.  It’s strange and huge and thrilling and intimidating.

Spending my life with Matt isn’t strange or intimidating, by the way.  Days with him are normal and comfortable and happy.  But the whole thing where I’m committing the rest of my whole wide life to someone else is starting to make my stomach squish around a little with happy nerves.  The idea that 27 years from now we’ll be somewhere something like where my parents are now, presumably.  That someday we could have a kid who’s part Matthew and part me.  

The little things are making me oddly nervous this week.  I write this lying in our new (queen-sized) bed that is comfortable and all mine for a couple of days.  I’m sleeping better than I have in a long time in the lovely new squishiness, but it doesn’t quite feel like mine yet.  The whole thing – my whole life after Saturday – none of it quite feels like mine yet.  My new name (that’s a post in itself, too) feels strange under my pen.  My honeymoon next week feels like a far-away dream.  It’s not real that I get to go on vacation with my new husband.  It can’t possibly be.  Oh, and speaking of that – I’m going to have a husband.  

Strange and wonderful, that time does actually move on.  That the boy in my sister’s high school play who I was secretly swooning over almost five years ago turned out to be my Matthew.  That it feels like yesterday that Tony and Andrew and the rest of my cleaning crew were telling me that I should just go out with the guy already, since we were so obviously perfect for each other, but that at the same time I can hardly remember what life felt like before I loved him.  Strange and wonderful that a year and a half felt like forever when we got engaged in January of 2011 – and more often than not still felt like forever until about a month ago – and now is gone.

Strange and wonderful that I’m sure a year from now I could look back on this post and struggle to remember this feeling of happy anxiety, that I’ll try to remember what life felt like before I was his wife, and it will feel strange, I’m sure, to remember that I haven’t always been, just as it feels strange now to remember that he hasn’t always been in my life.

In the end, if it were just me and him, I’m not sure I could do it.  It would be too scary to take my confused, broken human life and tie it to someone else for our next who-knows-how-many years.  All of them.  Till death do us part, whenever that is.  It’s too big for two humans to take on.  But our marriage is one that has three parts all working together: me, Matthew, and Christ.  Jesus holds it all together and makes it work.  He taught us how to love and in loving each other well and loving Christ well, we can show just a smidgety glimpse of God’s grace and love to each other.

I’ve been reading this passage a lot this week:

“He was supreme in the beginning and – leading the resurrection parade – he is supreme in the end.  From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone.  So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding.  Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe – people and things, animals and atoms – get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.”  (Colossians 1:18-20, The Message)

It all fits together – it all works – because God is so big, because God loves us, and because God can hold it all.  Because God can take my brokenness and Matt’s brokenness and fix it.  And then he can take us and make us fit into this giant and unspeakably beautiful piece of music that the universe sings.

Our marriage is part of that harmony.  It is part of God’s plan and he’s going to use us for good.  That’s why, despite all the anxiety squishing around, despite the stress and busyness of preparing for the day, despite the rain in the forecast, Saturday is going to be the best day.

( by the way, if you read all that, you’re a champ.  It’s 1:30 and I can’t sleep, which is why all those thoughts came gushing out all at once and not very organizedly.)