Dream, Provision, and Sorrow

June 30, 2006 will go down as one of the greatest days in my (Shaun) life. On this day God allowed me to marry the woman that I dreamed of marrying. At this point in time however I didn't realize that I dreamed of marrying her. Don't get me wrong I knew that I wanted to marry (otherwise I would not have proposed), however when the word DREAM was used at our wedding by the pastor that performed the ceremony I wondered why. 730 days later I no longer wonder why he would choose such a word.

Over this period Rachel and I have had the opportunity to experience many amazing and heartbreaking things. The title of this post is three words that I would put on our first 2 years of marriage. Dream was an acronym used by Mark to guide in our years of marriage. Provision would be the word that I would use to describe our first year of marriage. During that time we were able to see God's hand in almost everything that we did as a young couple. I had put myself in a small (by most peoples' standards) financial crisis. Over our first year we were able to pay off 80% of the debt that I had accumulated and not have to miss a single meal or anything because of it. God put us on a track to pay my debt off because of the frugality that He had been teaching Rachel to live with from the beginning of her adult life. By the end of our first year of marriage we had purchased our first new house and were able to get almost all of our debt paid off.

Sorrow would be the word that I would use to describe our second year of marriage. This has been a year were we have experienced death 3 times and in 3 very different ways. The first taste was a very special woman in my family's life when "aunt Andy" passed away (not a relative but acted as my mom's mom much of her life). This was painful, but because of the distance that had grown (only physical not emotional) over the last few years it was not quite as tough. The next pain was when we lost our first child to miscarriage. This was a pain that I would not wish on anyone, however it was during this time that we were able to grow so much closer as a couple and I fear to say that we would not have been able to reach this depth in our relationship this early without something like this happening. The 3rd taste of death was when Rachel's grandmother Nanny went to be with the Lord. This was very unexpected and took us all by surprise.

All this to say that it has been awesome to see God working in our lives in the first 2 years of our marriage. God is awesome and I thank Him for the woman of my dreams, even when I didn't know that I dreamed for her exactly.