Juxtapose

Times have certainly changed, my friends. We've all gotten lazy with Facebooking and Tweeting and putting babies to sleep at all hours of the night. I've gotten lazy. To sit and write seems like a selfish luxury, though nothing could be further from the truth - to sit and purge my brain of so many thoughts is a necessary release and it couldn't be more important to do now than it has ever been.

I have a problem, however. Whenever I sit to write all I can think of is my husband. His face, his quiet friendship, his beard on my cheek. I loved him when he was words on a screen and a voice through my phone, I loved him the day I married him, and I loved him more than all of these when our daughter lay sleeping in his arms in bed with us this morning. I tap my brain to sit and write out my frustrations and my sadnesses, and I find it suddenly unnecessary, knowing that he has already listened to them, my God-given confidante. He has taken up my griefs as his own. And yet we are separate people, which seems so inconceivable. I'm reminded of Madeleine L'Engle's poem To A Long-Loved Love, lamenting:

"You are still new, my love. I do not know you.
Stranger beside me in the dark of bed,
Dreaming the dreams I cannot ever enter,
Eyes closed in that unknown, familiar head."

It's been six years since I met this husband of mine and as I muse on all the oddities of our separate lives coming together to make a singular life together, I can only say that God is good. He saw so much that I didn't see myself, and I know He sees things in our future that I may never want to know. But He abides with us. To know the unknown is something we expect of God, something we barely think of when we muse on His vastness. We expect it, so mundane, so much a given thing that God knows where we are going, when truly it's anything but.

And yet the contrast seems so clear to me. With this husband I can experience with every one of my senses, we are still somewhat strangers, and yet he loves me, he cares for me, he knows me in some mortal manner. How much greater then is it that I cannot see God, cannot sense him in such a human fashion, but I know my future is known, and I can know His plans for me. And He loves me.

In a marriage, as with any friendship, we struggle to know one another and understand all the nuances of our mutually-lived yet separately-experienced lives, to make sense of what things mean and how they affect us and what we should do with all this information we are given. We fail so often because we are still somewhat strangers in familiar bodies with familiar voices. It's in this realization that I take so much comfort that we are strangers to God, but God is no stranger to us. He sees us moving in our little joint life and it's familiar. For God, there are no surprises.