Scars

Grief.

That word is so heavy- it carries with it such a somber connotation. As soon as you read it, it probably elicited some inexplicable emotion... for most, it is probably associated with the loss of a loved one. Without trivializing that at all, I'd like to address a different form...

Megan's blog about scars last week prompted me to reflect again on a period Jon and I went through when he was getting ready to come back from Iraq over two years ago. As you know, we barely knew each other when we married and he deployed- it was a bit of a whirlwind relationship. As we were discussing what it would be like to actually live together, we realized that there were things about our pasts that we had not fully "gotten over"...

About that time, I was reading (well... ok... more like skimming to get to the parts that interested me...) a book called Fighting for your Marriage- it is, oddly enough, a part of the Army marriage curriculum. In it there was a chapter on the grief process. The authors maintain that one can- and should- grieve over what is lost by gaining a marriage. That may seem like an oxymoron at first glance... Marriage is great! I would trade it any day over being single! (I hope you can say that anyway... ;-) But really, think about it. Aren't there things about being single you miss? Freedom? Opportunities? Being able to eat Taco Bell whenever you wanted (ok, maybe that was just me...) Maybe it was relationships that you had to release- or relationships that took a different priority. In some ways, spending the first year apart from my husband made that easier- I could ease into "married life" a bit... but at the same time, not having any mutual friends or connections made this incredibly difficult. We had different lives, different histories, different priorities, different friends. I am so thankful that we were able to accept those things in ourselves- and each other. Those were hard, dark days, to be sure. It is one thing to go through it yourself- but to give your spouse room to do the same is difficult.

There were things lain on the altar of our marriage, things that we never cried over. And I'll be honest- I think we would both agree that there were some things we didn't quite want to let go of. Having sorrow for what is lost is not wrong- hanging onto it is. As Megan pointed out, the only way for a wound to heal is to care for it- if ignored, it will only breed infection.

Through the last couple of years, we have both realized that what we lost pales in comparison to what we gained.

We have also built such a trust that enables each of us to have greater freedoms- to regain some things that were lost- but with a different priority.

I think that this could be applied to a lot of areas. Jon and I were talking about this grief process the other day at lunch, and how much giving each other space to feel sad about things lost really allowed us to get beyond some barriers in our relationship. We discussed how we are going through the same thing with Sophia- I love her inexplicably- and yet, I grieve for the loss of freedom to go where I want when I want. I grieve that I have to share Jon with someone else. Heck, I grieve a solid night's sleep!

In Megan's discussion of scars, she pointed out that we should not aim to erase the past from our memories; instead, we should allow them to shape our lives for the glory of God. Hers was in the context of scars from experiences that were out of our control- I submit that the same could be said about the scars that result from our own (even good) decisions- just because what I chose is good, that doesn't mean that what I didn't choose was all bad...

The scars that we carry can come in so many different forms... some wounds are deep, some are surface, but all need to heal... and in allowing that, we can appreciate what is so much more than what was...