spaghetti sauce, justin bieber, and the list.

Perfect Spouse List: A method for encouraging young people to practice patience and fidelity to a future spouse by listing the qualities they hope the person will carry. 
Somehow, we got this idea that it would be good to list out the qualities that we wanted in a future spouse. and it caught wild. 
We were a generation of young, Christian girls, feasting on a diet of Nicholas Sparks movies and Gilmore Girls. In the Christian romance novels we kept bedside, the heroine's love interest was most definitely a surfer with blue eyes and missionary ambitions. 
We knew exactly what our future husbands would look like (right, Kaylin??!), and we were madly ripping out college-ruled notebook paper, planning fairy-tale futures in loopy cursive. 
My future husband will love God. 
My future husband will buy me flowers on Valentine's Day. 
My future husband will pray with me every night. 
My future husband will open the car door for me. Always. 
Occasionally, hearts dotted our i's. 
Marriage was the finish line. The place we all wanted to be, the line on the horizon where all the pinks and oranges swirl in the hazy dawn. It was far. But it was perfect. And we couldn't wait. 
There was a lot of pressure not to settle. Not to make the wrong choice. To wait for The One, to keep your heart wholly together until you found him. 
He would be your Christian Prince Charming, with Justin Bieber hair and Billy Graham faith. The two of you would get married, work with the youth group, and be madly in love. 
At least that's what we wrote on the list. 
I find it all sort of ironic now. This list of expectations in a faith that screams grace. 
We fail. We fail, we fail, we fail. Yet Jesus comes anyway. He came anyway. His feet grow dusty on our weary dirt roads, and He chooses us. Every time. Us who cannot live up to the lists. He settles down deep into the pain and the story and the challenge and the love in it all. 
I'm not married. Yet. 
But I watch. I take in the marriages around me. 
and here's what I've learned: I don't need the man I marry to match the list I made at 15. 
That list, buried in the winter camp journal, in some big Rubbermaid storage bin, is hollow. Its voice echoes, lonely, under the high ceilings of the unattainable and the unnecessary.
The beauty of marriage is in the reality. In the pain and in the drudgery, in the mundane and the ordinary.
I watch her. and she makes a sweet comment about how handsome he is in that old hoodie sweatshirt.  He is sometimes doing the dishes, and sometimes he is not. He is watching The Bachelor with her. He is bent over his remote, playing some video game she doesn't understand. He grabs her hand and twirls her in the kitchen: dancing, just for a moment. She says something cutting; he is silent, distant in anger. They ride it out, together. Apologies are exchanged. They're laughing again. He's barbecuing. She's tossing dried cranberries into the salad. He prays. She smiles. He is throwing the children high up in the air, getting them all riled up before bedtime. Group hug time. 
That's marriage. At least I think so. 
I am praying today that I will continue to dream big dreams for my marriage. Big dreams are good. Necessary, even. But I'm also praying that my big dreams will be a clear reflection of God's heart and design for a man and his wife. 
I'm praying that I would remember that our shared journey of faith won't always look like hands folded together in bed during long evening prayers. Instead, our life together will be a conversation we are always having. It's the way we keep at it, relentless, when life is hard. It's going to church. It's skipping church while he reads the newspaper in his big comfy chair, and I write at the kitchen table. It's fighting and apologizing, compromising and learning. It's a quick kiss on the lips. 
It's finding his shaved stubble trails along the bathroom sink. It's the leftover spaghetti sauce getting crusty in the unwashed pan. It's the toothpaste tubes, the toilet paper rolls, and the bars of soap. 
That's love. 
It's real. It's messy. 
It's beautiful. 
It's breathtakingly beautiful in its complexity, its simplicity, its wholeness, and its brokenness. 
Wishing you love today, whatever that looks like for you.