Support Is A Gift

My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary over the weekend. Each year we recycle two questions: What were the best things about the past year, and what were the worst? Some years make it easier to answer these questions while other years make us want to dodge them altogether. We don’t usually exchange gifts, but we altered the rules this year because I had a “brilliant” gift idea for a change.

The past year left both of us “looking for a win.” Raising a two-year-old, another year of residency, and me declaring a new career while making a mad dash for my seminary finish-line added a lot of emotional miles we seemed to have sprinted through. When it came time, I was sure I had created a winning gift. It’s not a competition, but nonetheless I was ready to take a victory lap around the restaurant. My wife loved the allegorical story I wrote of a boat and the sea symbolizing our marriage. Her happy tears were my trophy of victory.

When we got home from the restaurant, it was time for my gift. My wife had framed a poster rendering of a patent proposal for a typewriter. My loss of words became her trophy. She told me she wanted to give me something to remind me of her support for my writing. I was stunned. It’s not very often someone can give you something you didn’t know you wanted. It’s easy to forget how badly we desire to be supported by those closest to us. We sometimes try to demand it, but support is a gift.

It’s a strange thing to be chosen by someone. It’s an even stranger feeling to choose yourself when you decide to make a career out of creating something on your own (but more on that later in the week). But it’s overwhelming when those you love choose to support your choice to bet on yourself. It is truly a gift they are not required to give. Support is someone reaching into the most vulnerable of places to offer stability and hope. It is standing beside someone as they face the great unknown. It’s saying “I’m with you,” when someone feels they are on a lonely journey. And for a man like me, it’s humbling to receive when you don’t feel worthy of it. But that is the beauty of my wife, and that is the beauty of God’s design for marriage.

He made marriage to be a gift offered, not something to be taken by force. It is so many more things, but it is not less. Inside a marriage, two people have the power to destroy one another like no other relationship can. They also have the power to build up and cherish in ways no other person can. Taking the time to repeat “I choose you” is how you make the covenant of marriage sing every day.