it’s worth it. For here, on the other side of fear, lies freedom. Here lies the ability to love, savor, and create with abandon. And here lies the vibrant, adventurous, full life that God has created just for you.
Welcome, sweet friends.
Champagne Flutes
Fear is the enemy of love.
~ St. Augustine
For our wedding, Dan and I received a pair of champagne flutes. They were delicate and perfectly shaped, and I loved them. I loved them so much, in fact, that one night, having moved into a new home earlier that day, I pounded on the door of our old house and asked the bewildered new owners if I might peer into their kitchen cabinets to see if I’d left them behind in the move.
It was November, or maybe December, but definitely post-Daylight Saving Time, and the evening was cold, dark, and rainy. I must have looked a sight with my long coat pulled tightly over my ratty moving clothes and my wet hair stuck to the side of my face. I didn’t have their phone number, though, and was desperately afraid that they’d throw them out or give them away before I had a chance to retrieve them, so there I stood, pounding away with a slightly manic look in my eye.
They let me in, and there, tucked into the back of a worn wooden cupboard, sat my two perfect matching flutes. I quickly tucked them under my arm and hurried out of the home that was no longer mine with grateful thanks and mildly mortified apologies on my lips.
That twenty-four-year-old newlywed would never have believed you had you told her that five years later she would be furiously smashing those same glasses into a million shining shards against her kitchen sink.
Feats of Bravery
You do things in a marriage that you never expect you’ll do. You become a person that you never thought you’d become. Most of the time this is a good thing. Marriage has a way of making you more generous and selfless and generally less wrapped up in yourself. But that doesn’t happen by accident. That happens because marriage refines you by fire, and fire is hot, and fire burns, and if you have any kind of sense of self-preservation, you spend a lot of time wondering how you can escape this painful refining process. Not escape the marriage, but maybe find a way to make it hurt a little less. Or ask not quite so much of you. Or be satisfied with less than your all and everything.
The smashing of the wine glasses was my way of telling God to back off and give Dan and me a break. From Dan’s perspective it probably looked more like his wife had become a raging lunatic hell-bent on spewing the worst kind of vitriol in his direction, but at the heart of it my grievance wasn’t with him; it was (though I didn’t realize it at the time) with God. The God who had allowed relentless brutal financial struggles to mark our first years together. The God who held back the relief I thought we’d been promised. The God who had stood silently by and watched as the brave, fearless girl I’d been raised to be became a controlling, terrified shadow of herself.
When my mother was young, my grandfather started a family tradition called “Feats of Bravery.” That thing you are scared to do? You will do it, and you will do it with pluck because it’s a Feat of Bravery. You will cross the log that bisects the river, climb to the very top of the waterfall, and jump into the icy-cold mountain stream because you are brave all the way deep down into your bones and no log, waterfall, or mountain stream could possibly take that away from you. In fact, the opposite was considered true — these challenges actually served to encourage and strengthen you. This pursuit, and subsequent acquisition, of fearlessness was at the heart of our family culture, and I loved it.
And then somehow I lost it. I went from being a young woman who courageously backpacked through Europe, proudly assembled her own furniture, and adventurously drove solo across the country to a (somewhat less) young woman who felt utterly paralyzed by fear and anxiety. With every furious strike of glass against my metal sink, with every anguished cry, and with every hot, salty tear that rolled down my cheek, I was mourning the woman I’d been and begging God to give her back to me.
I sunk down onto the hard, cold tile and struggled for breath as Dan grabbed his keys and walked out the front door without a word. He was tired. I was tired. Our union was tired. My newly acquired anxiety, not content to stay tucked away inside me, increasing my heart rate and stealing my breath, had crept out and begun to poison my marriage.
I don’t know how most people handle anxiety, but my response was to try to control whatever circumstances of life fell under my jurisdiction. The problem was that many of the things that fell under my jurisdiction also fell under Dan’s jurisdiction and were, in fact, meant to be co-managed by the two of us. As I saw it, though, when your ship is going down, you can’t have two captains, and I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone being at the helm of our sinking ship but me. That sounds prideful, and to some degree it was, I’m sure, but it was more of a gut-level response to feeling that our life was spinning out of control and that I needed to cling to whatever pieces I could still command. All my husband could see, though, was that I was casting a more emphatic vote of No Confidence in him with each and every passing day.
I pulled myself off the ground and headed for my cold, empty bed. As was always the case after one of our increasingly frequent battles, the minute Dan left, all of my fury and resentment almost instantaneously dissipated leaving me bereft, full of regret, and longing for the comfort of his strong arms and familiar shoulders.
I reached into the top drawers of my mahogany bedside table, pulled out a well-worn See’s floral candy box, sat it on my lap, and pulled off the top. Inside were almost a hundred handwritten letters that Dan had given me over the years. It had become my tradition to read a handful of them after almost every fight, when we were apart for any extended period of time, and anytime I needed to be reminded of what was at the core of our union when you beat back the briars of weariness and frustration.
At the top of the pile was a journal entry Dan had composed about the two of us shortly after we’d met:
Cars may wreck around us, stocks may rise and fall, clocks wind down, but it’s not enough to distract us from each other as we chatter and ask and talk like two parts of a steamroller engine. I touch her and she touches back. She cares about me. She encourages me. She likes me, not for certain things I do, but precisely for what I am. I am what she loves. And she is what I love. How about that?
A heart-wrenching realization washed over me: I didn’t think Dan could write those same words honestly anymore. We no longer acted like two parts of a steamroller engine. I no longer encouraged him. And did he still know how deeply I loved him for precisely what he was and not what he did?
How could he when all I ever did was to correct, suggest, micromanage, and fret? What had happened to the carefree girl who loved with abandon and wanted nothing more than to make him feel beloved by her? And how could I fix it? How do you pull yourself out of a downward spiral when you feel so unbearably sad and paralyzingly afraid? How do you wrestle a sinking ship out of a storm when all your strength is gone?
The answer came quickly. “You pour love in, my sweet girl. So much love that it drives out all the fear. Every last bit of it.”
Call it divine inspiration, a whisper from the Holy Spirit, a gentle nudge from our heavenly Father — or all of the above, I suppose — but even before I knew exactly what this prompting meant or how to go about answering it, I knew that this was what I must do. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I must summon all the love I possessed, borrow a whole lot more from God,
