It’s wedding season! I am seeing so many couples getting married on my Facebook feed the past few weekends and it’s making my heart happy. Being married is so much fun – well, most the time if you did it right. It is hard to believe that tomorrow S. and I are celebrating SIX years of marriage!

This past year has been, by far, the hardest on us. It was about this time last year that S. starting having dizzy spells and chest pains leading us on this journey to a diagnosis of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy and ultimately open heart surgery two weeks ago. If you had told us, standing in front of our family and friends, six years ago we would have been sitting in a hospital for a week scheduling pain medication, looking for a cardiac rehab and figuring out follow up appointments – we both would have laughed. No one plans for these huddles in a marriage, but this hurdle has changed us as a couple. We both have learned our true strength individually and together which I find so empowering. Our hardest year has been my favorite so far. But if we could keep our seventh year less … busy … I would be okay with that.

So as we celebrate six years of marriage, I leave you with this reading from our wedding:

“But ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Ultimately two people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take. It is indeed a fearful gamble. Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take. If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation. It takes a lifetime to learn another person. When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.” ― Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season