Four Years In

Four years ago, on March 14, 2009, Dave and I stood before family, friends and God and entered into the holy covenant of marriage.

One of the wedding pic favorites…

People told us that the first year of marriage would be tough… that it would be and full of difficult lessons in communicating and living together. We fortunately found quite the opposite to be true, as we had worked through many of those lessons during our engagement while completely renovating our home together.

And while that season of renovation was full of learning (and I’m not just talking about learning how to rewire the kitchen lighting), we can’t think of anything that could have made more of an impact on our marriage than this journey we have set out on together.

For this, we are grateful. We are grateful for lessons learned together: learning to communicate when one or both of us is frustrated or discouraged, learning to balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses, learning to care for the other in times of sickness. We are grateful for memories we’re making together: appreciating the beauty of Patagonia, enduring long climbs in the Andes, watching sunsets on the Pacific, pushing through hot days in Central America, crossing rivers in Laos. We’re grateful for the unique community we’ve built together: meeting cyclists from around the world and being shown hospitality by complete strangers along the way.

And most of all, we’re grateful for this season as a whole: that so early in our marriage, we have the privilege of actually spending all our time together. In our past life, we would wake up early… I would go to the gym, Dave would ride his bike to the carpool. We parted ways by 5:15 a.m. most mornings. In the evenings, if there wasn’t something else on the calendar, we would come home from work, often tired, eat dinner and hang out for a couple of hours before going to bed and doing it all over again. But in this precious season, we actually spend almost our entire day together, only separating on some days while I go inside to buy groceries and Dave sits outside with the bikes for security.

From our honeymoon in Jamaica, March 2009.

Along the way, we’ve met many couples who are on trips similar to ours but who are not married… maybe they’ve been together for a while, but marriage has not yet entered the picture. Some of these couples have made comments along the lines of, “Oh, we don’t need to get married, it’s just paperwork.” But we beg to differ. We believe being married has shaped our journey significantly. We know that we share a lifelong commitment—it’s not just about signing papers. We believe that marriage has given our relationship a depth and value it couldn’t otherwise have.

And so here we are, four years in, realizing that THIS relationship is perhaps the greatest adventure we can embark upon in our lifetime. And we look forward to what the years ahead hold—“until death do us part.”

To celebrate our anniversary, we partook of our annual tradition of making (and consuming!) a pie, since we got married on 3.14 (Pi Day!). This year we are fortunate enough to be in Bangkok, where we can find pretty well any Western luxury we want. So we made a very tasty peanut butter pie in an Oreo crust. DELICIOUS! We also went out for a celebratory dinner–true American food at “The Great American Rib.” It was such a treat to enjoy real Southern barbecue… with sweet tea even!

All dressed up for our dinner date!

Dave takes great care in decorating our pie with chocolate chips.

The finished product! Four years celebrated well.