Eleven years ago, Friday, we Celtic danced, Psalm-singed, and antique Rolls-Royced our way to matrimonial bliss. It was a unique day!! The photos are beautiful even if it’s not all the same as what I would choose today. I’m pretty amazed by my good taste at age eighteen and still incredibly thankful for my parents financial and emotional investment in making that day everything it was.

David and I celebrated our anniversary yesterday with a family morning (food, coffee, good books and a short movie) then Sarah came over to give us the afternoon off together. We drove an adventurous hour (read: mud, ruts and near unintended off-roading) to the Sempaya Park where we saw the “male” and “female” hot springs and cooked our eggs in the boiling sulfurous waters. Accompanied by a forest ranger, we stalked through the ancient jungled woods and nearly stepped on a brilliant green snake which she identified as a Mamba. Later we went off-trail to discover the pool at the bottom of a tall waterfall we have often glimpsed by the road. Nearby we passed a local man making charcoal from ancient hard wood trees felled to make room for the new electrical poles.

So yesterday was a day for seeing, for glimpsing new beauty and new danger. For remembering the old and the way that it makes for the new. For noticing the value that is lost in the process, sometimes. We followed a long walking bridge towards the second, larger hot spring. The bridge was made of split wood, spaced just far enough to create the illusion of the possibility of falling through. When I looked down I walked slowly, gingerly but when I looked ahead, around, up, I walked surely and with confidence. In reality I couldn’t fall.

We wrote our wedding vows ourselves and they are still intensely beautiful and excruciatingly commitment filled. Eleven years on we can even better see the depth of our hearts for each other, the fullness of our desires to see each other grow, and yet the complexity of loving each other well. What do we do when we fail to love well, when vows which were promises based on our best hopes and wishes are impossible to really keep?? And so we talk about what vows mean, what we do with our imperfect selves, how to relearn each other now amidst the struggles of parenting, ministry and life in rural East Africa.

I have a tendency to look down at the cracks (like in that bridge I mentioned above); to focus in on the fears, the potential failings, to panic. In my better moments I am a visionary; but that too comes with it’s own issues. I can see a better future reality but my fear of the cracks get in the way of reaching it all. That’s where I tend, but that’s not what I want. So instead, I will choose (again) to embrace the beauty and the danger, to embrace David, to embrace all the choices that have brought me to this point, to embrace today and tomorrow as well as yesterday, to embrace my children and my friendships. To embrace the challenges that I fear and the ones I can’t wait to overcome. I don’t know where we’re going or how the world we’ll get there but the bridge ahead beckons, and I’m keeping my eyes up. With David beside me, and God in and around me, NOTHING is insurmountable. After all, I’ve got the faith that can make a mountain JUMP!!