As I reflect on my five year wedding anniversary today I can’t help but to think about all the things the Lord has birthed through our marriage. Marriage is a commitment and serious business when you make a covenant with a person you decide to spend your life with.

Through marriage, I have learned that couch conversations your spouse has with you should remain a safe space. A space where they can share their hardships, successes, dreams, and goals. A space where trust can be established and built.

The adventure of marriage has a lot of those, “it’s not about me” moments. It has a lot of moments of laying down your selfish agendas on both sides so that your marriage can grow into the place God desires it to. It has moments of apologizing where you fall short and admitting where you could have said something better.

In marriage, I have learned how to keep dancing through each and every season. I have learned to grow in the sound of love even through hardships because truly, hardships do come. I used to believe that hardships are major destructions to life but what if they aren’t?

In life, in marriage, God does neat things where he sends individuals in our space to fill gaps and lessen the noise of what we believed we could accomplish on our own. That is what this marriage journey has been to me. I have spent nearly the last five years learning, becoming, growing, and being taken out of comfort zones and unfamiliar places.

Months before our daughter’s first birthday, we sat around the table again to have another conversation about wanting to add another addition to our family. As I had already endured childbirth in less than two years, it would be a risk to extend our family with two children under the age of two.