“It’s not just a wedding, it’s a marriage,” I was telling Mike as we sat at an outdoor cafe on a chilly night. Chilly for me anyway, with my Southern California-bred low tolerance for cold evening breezes.

Mike, the pastor at our church, will officiate our wedding ceremony. We were talking about our vows. Do we write our own? Do something more conventional?

As a proud rule-breaker I was all for doing our own thing. And yet when I thought about what my own written vows would be, I choked up. That has been happening a lot lately.

Not just this wedding but this marriage has been a long time coming. It would not have been able to exist without the decades of my experience before, including my highest triumphs, my deepest failures and the day-to-day living in between.

We all have times in our life where our primary goal is to survive the next twenty-four hours. And somehow we do and we realize that the “day-to-day living in between” is itself a high triumph. The horizon expands and the sunlight lets in a bigger picture.

That bigger picture is
our marriage
our girls
our spaz puppy
our home even as it will change again
the challenges we are facing now and have yet to face in the future
and our creative life with new adventures and experiences that we are trying to bring every day.

“Be assured,” Mike said to me, “that I will probably make fun of you because Charla had to ask you out twice.” With what has been and what is to come, I am fine with that.