For Patrick, Fifteen Years Later

I remember praying for you.

One day when I was 13 or 14 I knelt beside my bed and before I went to sleep I prayed for you.

That God would bless you that day and every day. Help you with exams and give you joy and give you a strong and true and loving heart. That you - whoever you were, wherever you were - would have a happier moment today, and many happier moments in your life because someone who longed to meet you was praying for you.

When we crashed heart-first into each other and got married I could not believe my luck. 

Some people put on their best self like a jacket when they go out. They wear bright shiny smiles for strangers but put on something less lovely for their loved ones.

You save your best self for home.

Your warmest love and happiest laughter and most devoted kindnesses - you pour them all out right here for us. For me.

I've always said the first year was our hardest year. Learning to be around each other all the time and how to fight and make up and what's worth arguing about (I guess we still argue about that 😅). And folding towels.

Before we got married, my mom told me not to worry if you do chores differently than I do unless I wanted to always do them myself (good advice). We wash dishes and sweep differently, we sort things differently, we fold shirts differently. 

But after a few loads of laundry I found myself unfolding the towels you'd folded and doing them my way (the right way lol). You laughed and said folded was folded. And then, when I persisted in the refolding, you tried to learn my way. Muscle memory was not your friend, and the towels always ended up in long skinny weirdness that didn't fit anywhere. And finally I just told you not to bother - that I was refolding them anyway so you might as well leave them for me.

You didn't. So I've been refolding your folded towels for years. (Not resentfully! I love you.)

Last year we installed a gorgeous new set of shelves and a new washer and dryer in our laundry room.

And wouldn't you know it, the towels fit best on these new shelves when they're folded the way you first folded them a million years ago when we first got married.

So, smiling a little at the relief it would be for you, I started folding our old towels this new, old way.

And something weird happened.

I kept finding them folded my favourite  way on the shelves.

Each time I adjusted them, thinking my muscle memory must have kicked in and I'd forgotten to fold them the best-fit way.

I found them again.

And then again.

And finally I realized that

After fifteen years

And me giving up on it entirely

You had finally mastered my favourite fold.

My darling.

You kind soul.

This wretched lonely year, when we can't get away for a date night or a moonlit stroll, you still manage to spell your love out ... in towels.

I am grateful for our first hard year, this last terribly hard year, and every year in between. 

Thank you for loving me steadily and gladly and deeply.

You are beyond what I dared ask or think and I love you. 

Xo.

Blessing and Cursing

My friend shared this post today, where she talks about blessing and not cursing - and the way it's holy, Godly, to cherish the scraps.

And the way that when you cherish goodness in leftover bits, you begin to look closer, to see with wonder, to see the value in each created thing and in each created one.

Even others.

Even yourself.

Even others.

God has been whispering this to my heart for quite some time. 

I used to think that curses were formal things - formal wishes for evil and harm, by someone with power to make it so.

And blessings too. Formal wishes for good and wellbeing, by someone with power to make it so.

But - as my friend points out in her post - Jesus says that it's a hellish thing just to call someone a fool. It disparages them and reduces them to the thing you're frustrated by. It's myopic at best. And it's a curse. It's speaking evil about and to them.

But the key - the deep down behind the scenes reason it's not okay - is because we're ignoring the holy truth about people when we blister them with a curse.

God calls us Beloved. Honours us as image bearers. Blesses us.

I think I would be a much gentler driver if I remembered that everyone is beloved of God and created in his image. 

And that remembering needs to start on my lips. 

Can you imagine?

Instead of calling someone a jerk or worse, imagine if I called them Beloved, Created in the Image of God.

Instead of speaking evil, speaking truth. 

"Cut me off in traffic, will you, Beloved, Created in the Image of God?" 

Or my kids? "Time for school my Beloveds, Created in the Image of God."

Oh guys. 

That sounds so much nicer.

So much truer. 

I need that word on my lips.

That truth in my heart.

Blessing, not cursing.

Thanks for reading, Beloved, Created in the Image of God.