This time 10 years ago I was pulling down piles of folded jeans from the top of my closet shelf and throwing them on the floor. All of them were too big. I’d lost 14 pounds since you’d left.
Since I found out you were really coming back, I finally cleaned up the clippings of your hair cut from that morning you left. I left them in the sink the whole time you were gone.. like you were dead, and I couldn’t bear to part with what was left of you.
I cleaned up the whole apartment. Something I hadn’t had the strength to do since you left. I moved your boots out of the hallway and tucked them on your side of the closet. I put a pillow back on your side of the bed. The part I wouldn’t touch because it was cold.. the nights I actually had the strength to sleep in the bed.
I found a pair of jeans from college in my bottom drawer and pulled them up with ease. Trauma to the heart is good for one thing and one thing only: starving yourself and dropping a million quick pounds. I stood over the sink in the kitchen with my sleeves rolled up and sweat on my forehead. The nerves were making me sick.
Three and a half weeks without you, my love.
I drove to Cincinnati to get you once and came back empty handed. On this night, I’ll drive to the heart of St. Louis and I’ll find you in the bus station and your deep almond brown eyes will knock me over. You’ve been gone so long I’ve forgotten they’re like that.
Hold my hand and kiss it the whole way home.
Lay with me. Tell me you’re sorry and you’ll never go again. I’m sorry too and I tore up the Lord’s throne room praying for this every night I was without you.
I love you.
Jackie Hill Perry has a quote that says “I am what God’s goodness will do to a soul once God’s grace gets to it.” She’s talking about the radical change the Lord made in her once He got a hold of her.
Our love is like that. Here we are ten years later and I laughed with you all day today and all night tonight. I hugged your neck tight and kissed you and sent you off to bed with a full heart. I adore you. I adore God in you.
I see His grace all over us.
The night you left you would have rather driven 7 hours in the opposite direction right through the middle of the night than see my face, and I hardly blamed you. Except before that, when I blamed you for everything.
This is something we are good at doing in marriages: We somehow blame ourselves for everything and carry enormous weight and guilt, and simultaneously blame our partner for everything and carry enormous resentment.
But God’s grace and goodness has gotten a hold of us, and I hardly know those two wrecked newlyweds at all. These days we’d rather stay up and talk through a fight for 7 hours than go to bed angry. Remember just a little while ago? We woke up in the middle of the night and we talked till 4?
That’s God’s grace and goodness all over us. You being my best friend in the world still is God’s grace and goodness all over us.
We’d be over if it weren’t for Him.
Every year, come January 25th, I feel the pit in my stomach.
I remember waiting on the balcony for you to come home. I remember driving up and down the streets looking for you, and I remember the agony of finding out how badly it all was really broken. How gone you really were.
Come February 6th, I say to myself, “This time that year, he was still gone.”
Come February 10th. Come Valentine’s Day. “Even our first Valentine’s Day.. I was alone.”
I don’t know if a year will ever pass that I won’t run my fingers over that scar. I feel less and less hurt over it, and more awe at how God can stitch something together so right that it looks more beautiful than it did before.
A person could sit here all week long with us these days and have no idea that this marriage was once left gaping open and bleeding out. When God’s grace gets a hold of something it binds it up, smooths the edges, and applies its healing salve over and over for years until it’s all the way redeemed.
To you, my friend reading, the one who feels the ache of it.. when I talk about a marriage like a gaping wound:
Have you tried letting grace swoop in?
Your hardened heart… Have you tried letting the walls down and trying to forgive someone who doesn’t deserve it?
Your counsel… the people in your ear… Are they godly? Are they speaking Scripture to you? Do they want you to be “happy” and be with someone who makes you “feel a spark” when they walk in the room.. or do they want you to be holy, and do the hard work of forgiveness and humility, and loving when it’s impossible?
I know all that work sounds like the short end of the stick. And I know it doesn’t sound fair. But you have no idea what could be on the other side of this.
For me, it was three beautiful children. A life of growing in the Lord and doing ministry alongside my husband. Seeing my husband grow into an incredibly strong, sound leader that I’d follow anywhere. It was a heap of glory to God.
Have you tried letting the broken parts soak in God’s grace yet?
I’m only saying, that I highly, highly recommend trying the grace thing. Having been there. Having both given and received it.
I’ve seen what dead things God can bring to life.
And to you, my husband.
My Julian.
The man I prayed for, and fought for, and then lost, and fought through prayer for:
Happy Anniversary. This day, 10 years ago, you brought the other part of my soul back to me. I felt it when you walked in the room. My other half, no longer hundreds of miles away.. but with me again. Closing my fingers up in yours. Kissing my hair.
This day, 10 years ago, I sent out that text to all the people who had been praying day and night for us:
“The eagle has landed.” lol
It’s you. You’re the eagle. I got you back.
I love you.
❤️ 😂 Also look at the pierced ears of your youth.
I still love you.
Jess Davis 