I've been thinking about marriage recently. One reason is that this is the month of
Svetlana's and my thirteenth wedding anniversary.
Another is that my sister is getting married in October and there is a
lot of excitement in our family about it.
I guess thinking about both of them, I do a little bit of comparing and
contrasting of what I think of marriage versus the modern view of marriage. It is a stark difference.
I’m actually not going to dive into a why I think that I am
right and that the world is wrong, but rather write about blessings that I’ve
seen in my thirteen years that really made the marriage stronger and made it
work.
I think one blessing was that we got married young. How young?
Well, not in our teens, but just barely out of them. I wasn’t able to legally drink! Furthermore, I wasn’t done with college and
Svetlana had just graduated with her four year degree (completed in three
years!). Neither of us had a job. I had saved up a grand total of $3,000 dollars
from my work as a karate instructor and lunch money my parents gave me. That is all we had in the bank account.
We were lucky that the apartment complex gave us three months
free rent. The first month was practically
a waste because we moved stuff in but lived with our parents. It was empty of people until after the
wedding. I think that was another blessing
because it meant that we started the marriage off by figuring things out
together.
Consider: no job, no experience living on our own, only
$3,000 to keep us afloat until Svetlana finds a job (we agreed that she would
be working while I focused on finishing my degree). We had to work together to figure this whole
life thing out. Before the wedding, we
were best friends and talked about all sorts of stuff together, but it wasn’t
the same as the intimacy of having to share the same fears together and fight
together. Only young lovers would be so
foolish! I would say if it wasn’t for
that foolishness, things wouldn’t be going as well as they are now. Things weren’t always peachy as it is always
a transition learning to live with someone, but I would say it would be much
harder coming from a fully independent life into married life. There was much less that I had to let go of;
I wasn’t set in my ways. Neither was
Svetlana.
Within a month, Svetlana found a job and I went to summer
school. We prayed about what I was going
to do for a job when I got out of school.
At first I was thinking of being a teacher, but after a novena to St.
Anthony, I started looking at being an actuary.
The fall came and I began my last year of school.
Then we did our next foolish thing, which was a tremendous
blessing. We got pregnant. It was early in the spring of my last
semester and we decided to be open to life.
That meant that we weren’t planning one way or another about children,
but rather letting God have the final say in whether and when we should have a
family. There was a possibility we
couldn’t have children. God decided to
bless us, which introduced all sorts of new anxieties. Svetlana was going to quit her job when the
pregnancy progressed far enough and I got a job. We decided that we would live off of my
income, and that she would stay at home.
Again – utter foolishness.
I graduated and began the search for work. I took my first set of actuary exams and got
the results on the same day that we went to the OB for an ultrasound. I failed.
And that closed the doors to the actuarial career at least for the
time. I reached out to my karate instructor
to see if I could teach and possibly help manage the school (he had three at
the time). When I called him up, he was
just about to offer another guy the job of school manager. Considering that I was an “insider," it made
life easier for him. So he gave me the job instead.
That was in the summer.
The pay wasn’t great, but we survived. I took an actuarial exam sort of as a
pragmatic measure while I managed the karate school. That December, my first son was born. In January, I got word that I passed my
exam. In April, I got an offer to begin
work at an actuarial consulting firm.
Money was tight for a while afterwards, but it was good enough. We had our little family and we knew things
were looking up.
Looking back, I see that we were foolish in the world’s eyes
on several fronts over the years, but I see time and time again that it
has been a blessing. Getting married
young was a blessing. Not cohabiting
before marriage was a blessing. Having
children early and not knowing how it was going to work in the end was a
blessing. And should we be
surprised? This foolishness is a
throwing of ourselves on God’s mercy and loving care even when we lack the
knowledge of how deep and abiding that love and mercy is. By having faith
in God you won’t necessarily be given a bigger, better house and the like. No, you’ll be cared for – we were never
without – but you will get something more: the grace (that you don’t deserve) to
make it through life’s trials unscathed and become a much better person.
I may muse more on marriage over my blogging life.
God bless,
Sven
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