A Letter to my Husband

"Dear Future Husband,
So, I met this guy. Haha - that's what every husband wants to hear their wife say, right?"

Okay, let's hit the pause button for a second. While you're at it, hit the rewind button, too. I want to back up for a moment and share something deeply personal with you. Are you ready? It's big. Okay, here goes:

Tonight, I ate Swedish Fish and Cape Cod Potato chips for dinner. Well, maybe a pre-dinner. I haven't exactly started cooking yet because I had all of these thoughts below floating around in my head and had to get them down on paper. Guess that's what happens when you haven't written in a while, right?

I bet you thought I'd come out with a BIG secret and it was going to be about the title of this post: "letter to my future husband." We will return to that in a moment. But for now, it is important to note that I had a non-stop, jam-packed day at work, felt like the Energizer Bunny, and Swedish fish and chips seemed like the logical alternative to settle down with the day that I had. In all honesty, this gluten-free gal sometimes needs a little of this "sweet and salty" food to get her over the mountainous days of teaching on rare occasions. Today, just happened to be one of those days.

Now, back to the topic that I started with: "Dear future husband..."

Back in 2013, a friend gave me a journal for my birthday. She wrote an entire epilogue inside as to what the journal should be used for. I used to write a lot as a hobby five years ago and then life caught up with me and it just dwindled down into sporadic spurts. I used to be really good about listening to my body and telling myself and my friends when they were taking on too much and needed to rest. Now, I see that we go through different seasons of our lives and I'm at a point where I'm noticing that I need to re-learn what "rest" looks like as a very late twenty-something.

So anyway, she gave me this journal with all of these possible suggestions for how to use it but, she had 1 request: that it had to be used to help me rest and yet, even made a suggestion that I took and used: let this journal be a collection of letters that you write to your future husband. This journal has always been at the foot of my bed where I keep all of my other journals that I have written in.

When I got home from work today, I took off my blue raincoat jacket, hung it up in the closet and went to my bedroom. I saw the journals sitting at the foot of my bed and picked up that tan colored one, creatively titled: "Letters to my Future Husband." :)

As I read through the letters that I wrote on an off between 2013-2015 (in 2016 and 2017, I didn't write any letters - there are a good amount of blank pages so maybe, just maybe, I'll start writing again this year!), I noticed a few things.

My journal entries include the sense of "longing" for a future man, kind of the way that God longs for us, or a wife or a husband longs for his/her spouse when they've gone away on a trip, or when they haven't seen each other for a period of time. In addition, I also noticed that with all of the interactions between guy friends that I had for that time period in history, I learned something about myself. Those men were put into my life for a reason to help me grow in understanding of myself, of my identity (one greatly rooted in God and my own values), and helped me in healthy risk taking. I didn't realize that at the time in which I wrote those entries that those situations would show me that or would be purposefully orchestrated for me to grow in those ways, but they did! And for that learning experience and for the ability to reflect on such interactions, I am thankful.

I've also realized that I like men who truly listen. Not those that "claim" to listen and just spit back information that you have previously shared with them. But, you know the ones where experience has caused them to be very good listeners and avid observers? It's those men, that catch my eye. That quality is few and far to come by in men, if you ask me.

And, it's not just men, but people in general. It's rare to find a good listener nowadays. It's commonplace to say that someone is a "good listener" but its like a pearl in a field, as one of the biblical stories says, that is the real gem of connecting with a listener. Because I feel that to be a good listener, you must have valuable life experience to support that. You must be able to relate to the person in such a way, and even sometimes, bring yourself down to their level to form a deep and lasting connection with them. I do have to say that there have been times in my life where I have not been able to connect with a person because I chose not to, or because I honestly didn't have that life experience but had that "friendship" and somehow, God helped me to relate to them.

I hope that someday, I will be able to relate to my husband. In my notebook, "letters to my future husband," (sounds like a book title, huh?) I have a lot of hopes and dreams for the both of us. Some of them are born out of personal desires and some come from a place of being a future couple.

Anywho, enough of my confessions tonight. Instead, I will leave you with an excerpt (somehow seems childish after reading this about 5 years later because I feel that I've greatly matured since this point.) So, to continue from this first part of this blog entry in quotes, here is the rest of it for your reading pleasure, straight from the thoughts of your favorite gluten-free gal:

"...so, I met this guy. I've known him for a while now, but we really only started talking at a house party yesterday. He pursued me, which feels strangely weird and exciting. He started to talk to me out of the blue (no pun intended.). . . anyway, when he talks or listens to me, he looks at me with those big eyes that just make me melt because he's intently listening. I've never met someone like that before. He's so humorous and makes me laugh - a lot. (I hope that you're funny, too.). . . "