I have a strong feeling a lot of people in my peer group are going to relate to what I am about to say.
By the time you reach the age of 25 in American culture, one of the biggest things we are focused on is…
(drum roll please)
Marriage.
Everywhere you turn, you are hearing about and seeing evidence of engagements and weddings, and the excitement, stress, joy, nerves, expense, and anticipation involved. Thanks to the world wide web and the wonder known as facebook, we are able to see exactly who, how, when and where just about everyone we know is getting married.
(I won’t go into the self-esteem issues we have created with all of our social media and the resulting temptation to compare lives…)
I was so excited to learn that my immediate family was entering this phase of life just yesterday when my brother proposed to his girlfriend (she said yes!) and they announced their engagement.
Being on the Race and constantly stimulated by new things, I have to say that marriage actually hasn’t been on my mind that much until just lately. But with my brother’s new engagement, with one of my best friends getting engaged in LAX, and with one of my current team mates planning to be engaged soon, I have been thinking about marriage and everything that lies within it more often.
Becki and Matt, moments before getting engaged in LAX.
God-willing, I am really, really excited to be married one day. The opportunity to develop the relationship on earth that most closely resembles Christ and the Church will be amazing. To commit to knowing and loving one other person for the rest of my life in the most intimate and spiritual way that humans can sounds both scary and exciting.
On the flip side of that, I like a challenge, and everyone says that marriage is one of the biggest challenges you will ever take on. Considering that marriage is a holy covenant with God Almighty, I want my marriage to be an act of worship. In the moments when my husband may be rude, self-centered, thoughtless, or just plain annoying, the fact that I told the Creator of the universe that I would love and honor this man forever will have to take over, and in doing so, God will be glorified.
I know what all of you who are married are probably thinking…easier said than done. And no doubt that is true. But I have to tell you, I think that God is using the Race to give us just a taste of what marriage can entail.
In January, I suddenly felt married to 6 strangers.
Starting the Race, we were all in the honeymoon phase….look at this cool new adventure! Oh my gosh, look at all the cool stuff we are going to get to do, and the stuff we will share! We are going to become so close, such best friends! We will learn how to communicate effectively! We can grow in our relationships with God together!
And so…
We lived in the same house. We ate meals together. We drove everywhere together. We slept in the same room. We shared a bathroom. We shared illnesses. We even had to share finances.
Suffice it to say, the honeymoon ended.
Not long after our trip really got going, we found our new “family” in an all-out, screaming, crying, pouty-faced…um, discussion. Everyone felt that at some point, if not regularly, they had been mistreated, unheard, unwelcome, criticized, overlooked, or even unwanted.
All of the fluffy ideas about our team being best friends for life started to wane. For the record, it is HARD coming from American culture to third world missions and living in community with others. In America, we operate SO independently from one another that it was a shock to our systems to begin to understand what it means to “prefer others” around the clock. Additionally, I am quite convinced that we ALL need to learn to communicate more effectively, and this became glaringly obvious in those first couple of weeks.
So for a little while we all stubbornly crossed our arms and stared in opposite directions, waiting for all of THEM to realize that THEY were wrong.
But we had committed to this. We had all fundraised, gotten immunizations, gone to training camp, quit jobs, and left families in order to live this life. You can’t just pitch a fit and “vote people off the island” when they bother you on this trip. Your team is decided by your leaders, and there is no “trade deadline” to make a last-ditch effort to form a team that will get along perfectly.
Wearing a make-shift skirt while visiting the Temple on the Mount in Chiang Mai.
And so…
We began to learn some important lessons.
We had told God that we would unconditionally use this year to serve Him and glorify Him; this was not contingent upon liking our team. And so we learned about commitment.
We had agreed to put others before ourselves. We were forced to let 6 other people’s desires for sleep, fun, food, and scheduling be considered more important than our own. And so we learned to prefer others.
We had committed to sitting down every day as a team and having feedback. Regardless of whether or not we wanted to, we were forced to sit down each night and tell each other ways we were excelling and ways we needed to grow. And so we learned how to communicate.
We all wanted to learn to love people in a deeper way. So even though there were times where we got on each other’s nerves, gave each other dirty looks, disrespected each other, openly preferred ourselves, and thoughtlessly did what WE wanted to do, we still were in tears over our team being split up at the end of month 3. And so we learned how to love.
Does any of this sound familiar in the context of marriage?
We will all draw from lessons we learned on the World Race when we are married. I know that in the big-picture sense, you can not compare this trip to marriage, because the length, level, and intimacy of marriage is unique.
But we will definitely be able to relate to the fact that it is both way harder and way more amazing than we could have ever imagined. Like the Race, marriage is something you have to be 100% committed to working on, for better and for worse, and it will ultimately be SO worth it.
To finish, can I just go ahead and give a disclaimer to my future husband that he will probably get annoyed with all my “lessons” from the Race at some point…
I am so excited for Matt and Jen, as well as my old team mate Becki and her fiance Matt, to start this crazy adventure together soon. Huge congrats to you both!
