The Gospel reading at our wedding was not that for which this
post is named, but since the phrase is so frequently employed in marriage ceremonies, it
was running through my head a lot this past weekend. Allow me to explain why:
Marriage preparation is all about getting to know your
future spouse, discovering potential areas of tension in your relationship, and
figuring out how to work through challenges together rather than in opposition to
one another. It is a beautiful time of excitement and anticipation and then the
wedding day arrives and you “are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matthew 19:6)
Woohoo! Mission accomplished! Months of planning have come to fruition and now
you are married! Your happily ever after can begin! And then you get home from the honeymoon and re-enter the real world.
Now, I am pretty sure that back in Bible days, a couple’s
consolidation of their belongings worked a little bit differently. Girls
weren’t out living on their own before marrying . . . were young men even
living independently? I guess what I am getting at is – you had some clothes
and some livestock and you were good to go. Therefore, Matthew does not go beyond
the union of the flesh. If he was writing today, he might have followed up
his profound commentary with:
“And their two piles of junk will become one pile of junk,
regardless of whether the husband or wife likes the other person’s pile. And
this will be the first great trial of a marriage and those who successfully get
through it will be strengthened by the Grace of God.”
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| Daddy arrives with the moving truck! |
I don’t know if it is a good or bad thing, but the process
of combining our belongings has been ongoing, and has yet to be finished, after
6 months of marriage. While it may have been nice to rip off the band-aid all at once, so to speak, slow and steady supposedly wins the race. Since I have moved so frequently in the last 8 years, I
have had many opportunities to pare down my pile of stuff, to decide what
sentimental items are worth keeping, and to donate or get rid of what I no
longer need or want. I still have some work to do on this front, but what I
brought to Texas was pretty much my minimum pile (in my world, craft supplies are part of the bare essentials required for life). All of my stuff and “our”
things made it here on one truck in the move from Florida. It all fit easily into
the apartment, and while we don’t have all of the major pieces of furniture we
would like to someday have, what we are currently living with makes us happy.
Poor Drew, though, moved to Florida in such a hurry three
years ago that almost all of his belongings got put into a storage unit in
Texas two hours away from Arlington. I think he was scared to show me the
inside of the storage unit the first time, and probably for good reason; we
were still engaged and in my head I was thinking, “oh my gosh. holy crap. oh my
gosh. holy crap.” Drew most likely thought I’d turn and run the other way after
he raised the storage unit door and I gazed inside. Since moving here, we have
slowly been going through the storage unit, re-claiming the things we want
and selling or donating the rest. Once in a while I have a
Christmas-morning-moment, like on Saturday when Drew found some “forever
stamps” - YES! Or a book I have been wanting to read - YES! Or kitchen
gadgets that I thought would be great to have but didn’t want to buy - YES!
The hardest part has been watching my husband go through all of the
boxes of books, clothes, pictures, gizmos, gadgets, and odds and ends that
represent his life before he knew me. He didn’t get to gradually go through his
things like I did, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to decide, on the
spot, which parts of his past life to give up and which to bring into his new
one. I am sure there is an added pressure on him when I am standing right there
saying, “And what about this box? And what is this stuff? And I don’t know what
these things are?” Try being helpful while not trampling on your husbands memories, it's harder than it sounds. It might not be important to me today, but since his pile of
stuff is part of his story, I want it to become important to me, too.
Each time we pull up to our apartment with a full truck it is
hard to see everything fitting into what we thought was an already-full living space,
but miraculously, there always seems to be room to integrate his belongings and
his memories into our current existence. Somehow, too, we get more organized
with each trip home from the storage unit. I am starting to understand my
mother’s tendency to purge the superfluous junk that seems to build up inexplicably over the course of time, and although sometimes I think it would
be easier to give up all of our stuff and start from scratch, it is also a fun
adventure to bring our lives together. I actually kind of feel bad for people who don't get to experience this as newlyweds. When we open a new box I get a little
peek at Drew’s past, which is a time and place to which I can never actually go
(until I meet the Doctor, that is). My husband has had such diverse interests
and experiences in his life, and this is one of the few ways that I can glimpse
who he was before I knew him. It has all been a fairly smooth process, and really, when I look past the dust and the
clutter, it is a tremendous blessing.
“Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6)
