Remember?

Everything is OK if I am dressed up and around people. Especially if it is people that don't know me especially well, even friends. It's easy to feel proud and strong in a stupid way; proud that he is doing what he is doing and that I am doing so darn well ALONE.

At the park, at church, at family dinners, at birthday parties, at weddings.

It's when I get in the car that it settles. The quietness, the loneliness. I don't cry very often, maybe twice a year, and this year each time has been while I am accelerating on the on ramp of the free-way. By the time I am actually on the free-way, I am all dried up again, even though I wish I could bawl all the way home.

Always, it's, Where's Joey?

I went to a wedding yesterday and in the vows each said to the other,

I will love you when we are together, and when we are apart.

The words hit me like a stick in my gut, and I wondered if any other married person in the room was feeling as uncomfortable as I was, self pity turning slowly into conviction.

I read Hosea, a book that has always grounded me in my marriage, reminding me of the unsettling truth that me marrying Joey had quite little to do with my own happiness and everything to do with God's ways; ways that are eternally good, ways that start with my own brokenness--

That's how I was brought to Joey. I was broken, I saw God's goodness, and I let myself, "be

chosen, blessed by love, as if anointed."

I forget this like it was a dream, and instead live everyday thinking that I direct my own paths. I create my own happiness.

Which is exactly what leads to the pitiful scene on the on ramp:

me teary-eyed, my heart like a dead weight in my body.

It's not that I have fallen out of love, it's that have forgotten my own vows, the promises of the God who is leading my every step, the blessing of the company of my soul mate, even if it's not on the weekends.