Happy anniversary to me!

Wow. As of this very day I have been married for 15 years! I realized just before falling asleep last night - oh, yeah - it's our anniversary tomorrow! When you have 3 small children sometimes it's all you can do to keep up with your to-do list and never mind what day it actually is.

Brian and I have always been pretty low key about holidays and celebrations - we like to have some sort of celebration somewhere around the actual date, but many times will just plan it for the weekend before or after. Sometimes people look at us funny when we say that, but it works for us.

It's weird to realize that I've now known my husband for more than half my life. We met when I was 18 and he was 19, though we weren't dating until after college. Funny to think that we almost didn't meet (I made a sort of last minute decision to change which college I would attend). Or that I could have met his brother instead (who went to a college I'd also been accepted to). Weird, huh?

One of the things that has characterized our marriage is our ability (singly or combined) to get into the most bizarre scrapes and situations - the absurd seems to follow us around and pop up at the most inconvenient times. I can't remember all of them of course, but here's a small sampling...

1. Been lost while driving too numerous times to count, including driving to a friend's wedding in a huge thunderstorm (missing the ceremony because of it), and finding ourselves in the middle of a cornfield in the middle of nowhere at night when we took the wrong shortcut.

2. Myriad inconvenient car trouble - like having our alternator obliterate itself halfway between PA and Massachusetts (but Brian had a spare, can you believe it!?!), having our car air conditioner die (temporarily thank goodness) while driving from PA to Florida in August, and getting a flat tire while out in WV camping with the kids.

2. Went on our first camping trip to celebrate our anniversary only to have the campground we wanted full up, and a pouring rainstorm that wouldn't quit forcing us to seek shelter at my folks' house for the rest of the weekend.

3. Me getting lost coming home from work at night shortly after moving to our new city and needing Brian to come rescue me. Brian accidentally locking himself out of our apartment and needing our neighbor to drive him in to get my keys.

4. Literally running from one end of the Atlanta airport to another with all our baggage when our first flight was delayed and our connecting flight was running on time while on our way to San Francisco to visit friends.

5. Renting a moving van for our move to Virginia, only to find out that 2 feet of its 14 feet were a tiny little shelf thing that held hardly anything. Brian managed to do a Chinese puzzle box thing with our belongings and make everything fit. And he drove v..e..r..y....c..a..r..e..f..u..l..l..y down the Washington Beltway, with me frantically trying to keep up with lane changes behind.

Of course, we really should have been prepared for such, seeing as one of our best "I can't believe that actually happened" stories happened on our wedding day.

Yep. We managed to break the key off in the lock of our honeymoon suite. Go ahead and laugh. We did - later.

Anyway, because Brian and I lived in two different cities while we were dating, when we got engaged we decided that it would be easier for the wedding to be held in my city - since I was doing that end of the planning. I would be moving to his city, so he would take care of the honeymoon and find us an apartment. Made sense. So it ended up that his whole family and our out of town friends simply decided to stay at the hotel where our reception was being held. And we (unknown to them) accepted a complimentary honeymoon suite for our wedding night so that we wouldn't have to pack up and drive bleary eyed to our honeymoon location (about a 6-7 hour drive away).

Well, it all looked good on paper. Except that Brian's best man and his brothers were determined to prank us, if they could find us. We'd kept our suite a secret, and so after we left the reception, we had to get in our car, drive around town for awhile, and come in the back way so they would think we were going to another hotel. Since our suitcases were in the suite, we simply stayed dressed in our wedding clothes figuring everyone would assume Brian had taken our luggage over earlier in the day (which, he had). We left, we drove around, we snuck in the back way, we found our room (after almost walking past their rooms) and we went to go in the room. The key wasn't working right so, operating on the "if it won't work just force it" principle (stop snickering) broke the key clean off in the lock. Brian held up the broken stub and we just looked at each other.

There was nothing for it but to go back down to the lobby and tell them what happened. So there I sat, in my wedding gown, in the lobby, just 50 feet from where our family and friends were having an "after" party and could come walking through the door at any minute. Amazingly, the locksmith came before we were detected and we got into our room with no one the wiser, and the pranksters were outwitted.

Yeah, we pretty much knew then how our married lives would go. And so it has followed with adventures too numerous to count or remember.

But hey - we keep each other laughing! And that's a good thing - I pray God gives us many more years to laugh together....

Tossed on the Refiner's fire....again

If anyone is wondering what has happened to me, well... the title of this post about sums it up.

Every so often I find that God has dumped me back into His refining furnace. The past two weeks have been almost non-stop - no earth shattering disasters, but still a constant, unending series of events - illness, health crises, behavior issues, finances. Dropping on me like Chinese water torture with little time to stop, or process, or rest.

I know God is holding me, but I can't help it - it hurts. I've been trying something different this time, though. Usually my first response is to call all my friends, get on the prayer list, tell everybody I know at church. This time - something inside me told me that that wasn't what I was supposed to do.

So I grabbed my Bible and got on my knees before God - a lot. I've had my share of "dark nights of the soul" over the course of my journey with God. This one feels different. More significant somehow. I think it's a part of that whole breaking through the glass ceiling thing.

The difference between Christianity and "churchianity". The difference between doing church, and seeking the face of God.