Gratitude and grief on our 10th anniversary

Today we’re thanking God for 10 years of marriage. My hands are trembling this year as I hold the gift of a beautiful life with Matt in a way they haven’t on any other anniversary. 

A college friend who I ran into while we were both trying on wedding dresses and got married just a few days after us, lost her husband to cancer a few months ago. 

And only four days ago our precious friend died unexpectedly, leaving behind a loving wife—one of my very dearest friends—and three beautiful kids the same ages as ours. Though we know he’s with Jesus, our hearts are just shattered by this loss. He was truly one of a kind.

As I’ve sat with my friend this week, I’ve been surrounded by reminders of their beautiful life together. Their bibles sitting together on the window sill in the dining room. His favorite sweatshirt mixed with her socks and the boys’ footie pjs as we fold the laundry. The stack of board games in the front closet. The most perfect and joyful family photos you’ve ever seen.

At my own house, as I make coffee for two,  wash dishes while Matt dries and puts away, or sit on the couch reading together with the playoffs in the background after the kids are in bed, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude and sadness and anger and grief at how wrong, how unjust it all seems that my friend doesn’t get to do these same things. Every single one of my senses are humming with the knowledge that this is not the way it should be.

The question I keep returning to as I pray and cry my way through our daily rhythms is this: Why do Matt and I get 10 years together when these friends do not? 

I don’t have a neat and tidy theological answer to that, and to be frank I don’t think one exists. What I do have is a Redeemer who inserted himself into the unanswerability of that question and holds me as I ask it anyway in the depth of my grief. I’ve got his presence that tell me he is the With in the face of all my Withouts. Those scarred hands alone can hold the gratitude and deep sadness we’re feeling all in the same breath as we praise him for a decade together. 

And if you and I were having this conversation out loud, you could hear the tremor in my voice as I say that that will somehow by his grace be enough for today.