four

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the day I married my wife. Marriage has been a learning experience for me--but not in the typical, "What do you mean I can't do whatever I want" kind of learning. It has been a learning of how to forgive, how to ask forgiveness, how to be generous, how to receive generosity, how to negotiate so everyone wins, how to lose so the other can win, how to laugh, how to translate, how to interpret, and how to be silent.

Marking anniversaries leaves me in wonder at how it can seem like you've been with a person your whole life, and yet you still think, "Man, it all goes by so fast." Some days you are just lucky to survive. Other days, the really great days, you find some space to savor it, to lock it in memory.

The next four years, if they are given to us, I hope will bring not only a new awareness of what the reign of God is, but a new depth into which we have entered it together.