Musing: All In

Just over a week ago, my favorite blog, A Practical Wedding (note: way more than just a wedding blog)  had a post about the dreaded question: how do you know? As in, how do you really really know if you're ready to get married? And it was open for discussion. As you know from the frequency of my writing on the topic, answering that question has been a bit of a struggle for me. I worry that I'm too young to be making this sort of a decision. I worry that getting married isn't compatible with my career goals. I worry that getting married is letting down my little feminist self that knows her strengths and wants to do big things and who shudders at the thought of being stuck in a house all day (that never turns out well, even with my introverted-ness). And the morning that I read that post, I was incredibly stressed on my second day of a three-day twenty-seven hour work binge to get a crucial but tedious part of my project done, and I was rather upset with Nate due to something he'd said during a phone call that morning. So as I was brooding and trying drum up the willpower to get back to work, I wasn't feeling all that confident in my "knowing-ness." 

The impatient moments of waiting for the plane to finally get moving and get off the ground at the beginning of every commercial flight are always marked by the safety presentation, in which a flight attendant smashes words together in order to speak as quickly as possible while her fellow crew members pantomime uses of seatbelts and oxygen masks with tired gravity. When they reach the part about emergency evacuations, three thoughts generally cross my mind. First, what are the odds that this plane is sufficiently intact following a crash to actually use the fancy doors and slides and such? Second, even if all the doors and slides work, what are the chances that we passengers will be calm and coherent enough to follow all these instructions? Will I actually remember to wait to inflate my life vest until I'm outside the plane? Where are these red pouches you speak of? Third, I know you say to leave everything, but is there anyway that I can grap my laptop? It's kinda my life...

But sitting on a plane bound for Texas on Friday night, when the hyper-speed safety briefing reached the evacuation portion, that third thought suddenly changed. Can I grab my laptop? Who cares-- I've gotta get home.

I'm not saying that being in a relationship or deciding to get married has made my life worth living-- far from it. I was a very happy, fulfilled, adventurous single person, and I'm pretty sure I could have stayed that way for a while had circumstances been a bit different. But this process of moving toward marriage has changed my priorities quite a bit, as it should. After all, in marriage two become one, which means I have more to consider than just my opinion when making even hypothetical decisions such as this.

But let me back up-- there's a very long, difficult week between the moody-wedding-post-reading episode and the laptop-dilemma realization mentioned above. At the end of my too-long, TMJ-inducing, stress-filled weekend, I found out that Nate was in the ER in Tucson due to a Crohn's flare-up. And for the first-time since I've known him, I couldn't be there. It was hard, but I knew that our wonderful friends were taking good care of him, and he seemed better the next morning. Then he ended up back in the ER for a second night in a row, and I started looking up flights and waking up in the middle of the night with somewhat-irrational fears that he could die. I felt guilty for not being there with him and for putting such a burden on our friends who have full-time jobs. But in the morning he said he was feeling better and I felt that finally, things were looking up. At three p.m. on Tuesday a friend called to let me know that Nate had been admitted to UMC because an obstruction had shown up on the CT scan. I sent off a flurry of emails and phone calls and booked the first one-way flight to Tucson the next morning. I worked most of the night before, unable to sleep and trying to get as much done as possible before I left. Deadlines were approaching in a week, but most of my work could be done remotely. But, honestly at that point, it didn't really matter to me that much what my work situation was like. I needed to get home and to that hospital.

The first time I think I ever really came close to "knowing" with Nate was actually on a trip to the ER. It was so frustrating to sit there helplessly holding his hand when he was in such incredible pain, waiting and hoping that a room opened up quickly, but I knew that I never wanted to be anywhere else but right there when something like that happened.I wanted to be there to fight through the incredibly hard, painful parts of life with him. (And he's been there through the difficult, painful parts of life for me thus far.)

And this time, again, being there in the hospital, some questions were cleared up for me. That nagging career v. marriage question? I would choose Nate over my career in a heartbeat. Fortunately, I don't have to: he's very supportive of my career aspirations, and he knows my strengths and wants me to use them. Am I young to be getting married? Yes, according to national averages. But I'm also graduating college at younger age than average, and no one fusses about that. And it makes sense to get married at this age, especially for practical reasons such as health decisions. "Fiancee" is an improvement over "girlfriend" in the hospital, but "wife" will carry much more weight. And regarding my feminist self...APW has some wonderful posts about that. Maybe in time my feelings towards "housewife" will change a bit; maybe that won't. (For the record, I do enjoy cooking and keeping a relatively tidy house because I enjoy having a well-working house and hosting people in my home. I just don't really want to be a full-time housewife.) Either way, feminism is struggle to achieve equal rights for women, part of which includes the right to choose how we will live our lives. So no, getting married does not equal failing or selling out as a feminist. And if getting married isn't selling out or career suicide or a young-stupid-kid mistake, then what arguments do I have left?

A little after twenty-four hours after I arrived at the hospital, we were homebound. The obstruction had kindly resolved itself with the help of some drugs to reduce inflammation and an Ng tube. We spent the last twenty-four hours together quietly while trying to get a few practical things done (wedding planning and apartment hunting). That persistent small fear that this all could happen again the moment I left made it a bit difficult to let him out of my sight (a technological mishap precipitated a walk to his house because I was terrified that something had happened and I couldn't get ahold of him because his phone was dead). As expected, this week's events did not do wonders for my anxiety disorder. And as much as he's promised to not get sick when I'm two states away, life, and especially life with Crohn's, is very uncertain.

In the end, I think I can say that I "know." I know not in the way that says things are going to work out the way I want them too or this is the 100% best possible choice I could be making right now. Love and marriage are inherently risky. There's no guarantees concerning what will happen in our lives. And there's always the possibility of loss. There's no knowing that our lives will turn out just the way we want them too. That's where trust and faith come in. And we are both inherently selfish people who will try our best to get beyond our own self-interest, but many times we will fail. That's where grace and mercy come in. But I do know that, from this point on, I'm all in. The laptop has been demoted. I am choosing to commit the rest of my life to learning to love Nate well, and together we're going to be a pretty awesome team. And I know that I am ready as I'll ever be to make that choice. 

And just to clarify, Crohn's by no means defines our relationship. It's been an unfortunate (but thankfully infrequent) interruption that has sparked some moments of introspection and realization. But most of our time together is happily healthy and mundane- evenings spent working together or lazy weekend afternoons, ventures out to explore a new part of the city or a nights spent in cooking and cleaning afterwards (a regular part of life sans dishwasher). I hope that most of our married life will just be the mundane stuff and the fun adventures. But it's good to know that we can get through the hard times too.

Monday's Musings: "The Most Important Decision in Your Lives"

I saw this movie Saturday night with a friend in Dallas, and I absolutely loved it. It might possibly be my new all-time favorite movie. (Go see it!)

Anyways, this scene in particular struck me because it feels so true. Getting married is likely "the most important decision I'll make in my life." (At least up to this point.) And unlike these two kids, I'm not in a hurry. I'm not so certain. I've thought about this a lot, and I'm terrified. I need a bit more time by the trampoline to talk this over.

See, I'm quite a bit older than Sam and Susy. I know myself a little bit better. I know a bit more about the world and how it works and the challenges that will probably come. (Or at least I think I do.) I can't just jump into this with wild abandon and child-like certainty. Commitment is hard. I'm a pretty selfish person, and both of us are far from perfect. What if something happens? What if we hate it? What if we drive each other crazy? What if we fight all the time? What if we both get into grad school/med school but in different cities? What if I don't have the career I think I want and I resent him? What if one of us someday regrets this? What if we're broke? What if our health fails? What if he dies? What if I accidentally get pregnant before we want to have kids? What if our plans don't work out?

I'm very talented at seeing worst case scenarios.

The last two weeks have been an interesting time for me and all these thoughts. The first week terrified me because, honestly, I didn't miss him. I dove right into the research work here and loved it. I was meeting new people and talking about theory and conflict and reading all day. If this is what grad school is like, I was sold. I was having so much fun. And suddenly, I worried that maybe I was making the wrong decision. If I could move to a new city and adjust this quickly and enjoy it so much, maybe I should be focused more on grad school. Maybe I want that more. And at the same time, I hesitated to tell the others on my program that I was engaged. In my field, twenty is a very young age at which to get married. And somehow I felt that telling people I was heading in that direction seemed the same as telling everyone that I was rushing into things and that I wasn't serious about my work and my future. (Not that that's in any way true.)

I went home the weekend after the first week for a lovely wedding and cried a lot. I spilled all my fears and doubts with Nate and talked about the mounting pressure I was feeling and this nagging fear that I'm not ready for this. (At the worst point, I confessed that I somewhat envied my friends that could just move in together without the commitment.) I told him about the negative stereotypes in my head associate with young brides and my fear that marriage meant I was chucking all my other plans and goals and identities out the window. It was hard. But I realized how much we already are a team and how much I lean on him.

This second week has been quite a bit different. While I'm still loving what I'm up to, I've seen the holes in my current life. I don't have someone to tell me to put down the books and rest and eat food (Nate usually does that). I miss having him around, talking with him, being with him. (I think a big part of the not-missing-him during the first week was due to the fact I knew I would see him that weekend.) Marriage is still terrifying, but I've met a few people who disprove the notion in my head that being married means you can't have a career and that you have to be a stay-at-home mom or something along those lines. My engagement came up in conversation, and no one looked at me as a "dumb kid" or someone who's not serious about my work. Turns out that stigma was just something I'd made up in my own head. (I do that quite a bit.)

I still want to go to grad school, and I want to marry Nate. And he wants to go to med school, and I want him to go. And I'm not sure how that's going to work. But we'll figure that out.

I'm still afraid sometimes that I'm too young to get married. I hear people talking about how they didn't "know themselves" at my age, and I think, "What if that's me? Do I 'know myself'? What does that even mean?" But I know that Nate and I are a good team, and we've been putting quite a bit of thought into this. (So many marriage books and marriage blogs and marriage articles and long discussions and questions and talks with mentors and talks with friends and talks with people who probably had no interest in my commitment fears and just couldn't figure out how to gracefully extricate themselves from the conversation...)

Those "what if's" are still rattling around in my head. And they probably will be for quite a while because I don't know the future and what it will bring. But I do trust that God would not intentionally guide me into a trap or something that will cause unnecessary misery.

I think that at some point, you just have to go for it. Not that one should rush into things, but there comes a point after prayer and planning and thought and counsel that you just have to jump. Because knowing myself, I'll never be 100% ready for this. I'm usually never 100% certain on these sorts of things. Driving away from the house after my first visit home from college, on the plane on the way to Russia, after hitting submit for the application to this program, I've had moments of panic, thinking "What on earth am I doing?!" I'm pretty sure I will have at least a couple of those moments even after I get married. Moments when I wonder why I ever though this was a good idea, moments when I question my judgement and worry about the mess I've gotten myself into. (At least this is what I've heard from some of the more experienced married couples I know.) But those will just be moments, and I think we've prepared enough to not experience those sorts of issues all the time. And we'll keep preparing.

Before we got engaged, I had been talking with one of my mentors quite a bit about marriage and my fears and uncertainties. And she finally told me that she thought I was ready to go for it because I'm "the kind of person who could always read one more book and talk to one more person, who could still be at the 90% sure mark three years from now." (Decisiveness is not my strong suit.)

We still haven't set a date yet. With so much keeping me busy here, long-distance wedding planning is not something I want to attempt to add to my plate. And at the moment I need a little bit more time to work through some of these nagging fears. (I promise we're still talking about it though. Hopefully there will be one set soon.) But I think engagement is slowly becoming something a bit more joyful and a bit less scary. I wouldn't say I love being engaged quite yet-- it's a bit too anxiety-inducing for my taste. (Wedding planning=terrifying. I'm not the party-planning type.) But I'm slowly figuring it out.

And who knows, maybe I'll get to the point where I can stand in front of someone, casually chewing bubblegum, and say that, yes, I've thought about this and I'm ready to get married, and I'm kinda in a hurry.

Monday's Musing: God is Love

A few weeks ago you might remember that I wrote about some of my deepest fears concerning God, fears that God will call me to do things I hate, that he is disappointed in me, that he wants me to be someone I am not. Over the break, I took a day off from working and had the chance to reflect on this further and spend some time in prayer and in the Word. And I came to this passage:

"We know how much God loves us and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God and God lives in them. And as we live in God our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in the world. Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first." (1 John 4:16-19)

 God is love, he loves us perfectly, and perfect love expels fear. So if I am loved perfectly by God, I should have no reason to fear. I finally got to this point after reading over 1 Corinthians 13 (the famous love chapter) and substituting "God" for "love" (God is love, thus God=Love and can be substituted). This ended up in my journal:

God is patient. He does not get frustrated and give up on me. 

God is kind. He does not act out of spite. He does not seek to make my life hard or miserable. 

God does not envy. He is not threatened by my love for others. He does not seek to isolate me. He wants me to have deep relationships with other people. 

God does not boast. What he says is true. He does not seek to belittle. 

God is not proud. Again, he seeks a true view. He seeks to develop humility in us; He does not take pleasure in humiliating us. 

God is not rude. Think of how you expect to be treated by a good friend who you know wants the best for you. God will not treat you worse than they would. 

God is not self-seeking. He seeks the absolute best for me. He needs nothing; he lives in total abundance. I am a constant recipient of his grace and generosity. 

God is not easily angered. He is not mad or upset with me. 

God keeps no record of wrongs. God is not disappointed in me. I have been covered by the blood of Christ. 

God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. God is not spiteful. He does not seek to hurt me. God seeks truth. He wants to reveal who I was truly made to be. 

God always protects. He wants me to take refuge in Him, to feel safe in Him. He is not out to wound me. He wants to care for me. 

God always trusts. He knows my heart and intentions. 

God always hopes. He sees all that I can be and works to help me realize my full potential for his glory. He has planned out incredible works for me to do since before the beginning of time (Eph 2:10). He looks forward to bing glorified in me. 

God always perseveres. He will not stop until he's done. He will not give up on me. 

God never fails. He will keep his promises. He will not screw up. He will not hurt me. He will not abandon me. He will always be good, He will always be generous, and He will always be trustworthy. 

God wants to shower his love upon me. There is nothing to fear.  

Photo taken by Kara Haberstock, June 2011, all rights reserved

Monday's Musing: Fears

I am afraid of a lot of things.

I had a really hard time with the chapter I read in The Good and Beautiful God this week. It was about how God is generous, and that he puts no expectation of "earning" on us. Instead, everything he gives us he gives out of grace and abundance with no expectations because he delights in us.  My first reaction was that this couldn't true. I especially struggled with the idea that God wants me to delight in him, that he is not disappointed in me, and that he does not have a list of things he wants me to do. James Bryan Smith writes, “We live in a world where people demand, oppress, wound, and condemn. In our world we earn what we get. So we project that onto God. It is easy to conceive of a demanding, oppressive, condemning, wounding god who must be appeased. The God Jesus knows is utterly generous” (84).  Honestly, I see God as demanding. He is calling me to do these things and to live this way, and he is disappointed because I am not living up to his expectations. He wants to give me these things or bless me in these ways but he can’t because I’m not doing this and so I am missing out. I should feel guilty because I am not devoting “X” amount of time or energy right now to my direct ministry and instead I’m doing other things (such as my internship, spending time with friends, working on my thesis).

Really, I struggle with this in most relationships. I constantly feel that others have expectations of me that I cannot fulfill and thus they are disappointed in me. For many people, that doesn’t matter too much because I’m okay with them not approving of me. But for those closest to me, the painful possibility that they are disappointed in me keeps me from letting them too close at all. I don’t want people to depend on me because I will let them down. People with high expectations of me scare me because I may not meet those expectations. I’d rather keep people at arms’ length rather than risk disappointing them. 

This chapter also raised another huge fear for me when talked about loving God. Smith writes, “If we asked Jesus, What does God want from me? I believe he would answer, God wants you to know and to love him.” But what does it mean to love God? This chapter talked about how we love God through delighting in him, through knowing his joy and his character. But for me, love has always been much more about surrender, about giving up, about sacrifice. Loving God means I am willing to give up my life- all my plans, all my desires, all my hopes, all my goals and dreams- and do what he wants me to do. And I do want to love God and I try to surrender all my plans. But I am absolutely terrified that God is going to call me to a life that makes me absolutely miserable. He is going to ask me to do things that I hate doing. He will take away the things that I love most, the things I am passionate about. He’ll call me away from the research and the analysis and the ethnic conflict and the things that I’m good at and that get me excited and passionate and ask me to do something that I don’t want to do. Loving Him will mean quitting my internship (which I love) and spending less time on my thesis or seeing my friends less. Honestly, I think I'm terrified that God wants me to be someone that I'm pretty sure I'm not. I'm afraid that God only calls women to be stay-at-home moms or only calls people into direct missionary work (instead of somewhere like the public sector). 

Now, I know in my head that these are lies. God does call women to things beyond child-rearing and to careers beyond direct mission work. But my heart isn't so sure. In the last week, I’ve rediscovered many of the fears and insecurities I had hidden so well from myself. I’m terrified of really giving my life over to God because I’m afraid he’s going to make me do things I don’t want to do. I’m afraid that God is disappointed in me because I’m not living up to his expectations. I’m afraid that with whatever I decide about my future I’m going to be disappointing a whole host of people. I’m afraid of a lot of things.

But I think that this it is good that I've uncovered all of these fears. It's better than hiding them. I don’t really know the answer to all this outside of this belief, this hope, that God really is good, and really does love me, so much of this fear is unfounded. 1 John 4:18 talks about how perfect love casts out fear. I can't truly say now that I can love God without fear. But I hope to learn to. 

Photo taken by Kara Haberstock, July 2010, all rights reserved

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