As we approached our 31st anniversary this week we found ourselves thick into debate prioritizing some major expenditures for our home and family.  We have not always seen eye to eye on the best way forward nor what should come first. Taken all together, the list of things needed to maintain and improve a home can be overwhelming. We were a little overwhelmed. 

I sat awake in bed the other night remembering a visit to our hometown years after we had left it.  I remember remarking at the family homes of childhood friends: the lush landscaping, the improvements made to the old houses. Having become a homeowner I had new and deep admiration for the time and investment that represented.  Having lived in some new developments I had a great appreciation for the fact that some things, like young trees, just took time to mature. No amount of effort or income could make it happen faster.

Our family friends had been planted in those places for 30 and sometimes 40 years or more.  They were of modest incomes and could not make big dramatic changes at any given time.  They were not of the big ticket "house flipping" era but rather of the "a little at a time" and "slow but steady" progress approach.  Here and there they added a deck, reworked a kitchen, built a garage, poured a solid driveway, replaced siding.  The improvements did not make for a stunningly different picture by themselves but the cumulative impact over many years was significant.  Morover, these midwestern folks were not just doers but maintainers.

You need to be both in love and life.

Society today is focused on a package that sells. It presents love and life as a full and complete brand when real day to day living is much more incremental. It doesn't always look appealing at a particular point in the process.  Kitchens look a lot like a disaster zone when you've dismantled all the old cabinetry.  Gardens look devastated when you are uprooting dead shrubbery and tilling up rocky ground.  The laborious, dirty, discouraging work is an integral part of forward progress though.  

 My husband and I are two very different people and sometimes act much like the 16 year olds we once were in that small town, fighting over the unwieldy paper road map on the side of a rambling back road trying to reach our destination.  Sometimes there is a huge difference in our individual visions of what "better" looks like. That can build a wall between people or it can stretch them to embrace different perspectives and try things they hadn't considered.  We have done both. 

If there is "extreme makeover" in life then it isn't my reality.  It isn't about finally making it or even getting it right in the "reasonable" time frame anyone may have set for that.  However, I woke up today with the man I woke up next to 31 years ago.  We are not marriage gurus. We are just two flawed people trying to get it right.  Not by any stetch of imagination do I expect we are now magically inocculated against disaster. We do know good ways to face disaster at this place in life and pray for the grace to always choose those ways. I have profound gratitude for having returned to laughter time and again. 

That is the gift that today is for me – the trying and failing and trying again and the cumulative very, very good things that three decades has blessed us with.