The Value in Learning to Struggle

I remember the day when Chad and I stopped somewhere in Arkansas on our way home from our wedding. We had been married in my little hometown in Texas and were driving to Nashville to start our life together. I couldn’t seem to stay awake in the car. Chad drove almost a thousand miles while I slept soundly in the seat next to him, perfectly content for him to carry me home after a whirlwind week of wedding craziness and a two night honeymoon.

We stopped at an IHOP, and the waitress asked us if we were married. We looked at each other and grinned. “We’ve been married for four days,” we said, practically giggling. I’ll never forget the weathered waitress looking us over and saying ominously, “Welp, I hope it lasts.”

Her words would come back to me just weeks later, after the real world had come crashing over our love affair like a wall of water. It felt like we were furiously swimming, trying our hardest to figure out which way was up. We were flat out of money, I had no idea how to manage a house, I was terribly homesick, and we had to go to work every day. This was nothing like the romance that we had been living out for the past two years, back when he was enjoying spending practically nothing on his low maintenance bachelor life, back when I was blissfully living on my parents’ dime.

One day I broke a glass in the sink while I was washing dishes. As I am prone to do, I dropped it, and it shattered. I stood there looking at the irreparable damage that I had done, and it felt like I was looking at a picture of my life. I hung my head right there at that old rent house sink and cried. Chad was bewildered, I’m sure, but he came up and wrapped his arms around me, sweetly sympathizing with the unreasonably emotional moment that I was having.

Our first year was a struggle, to be sure. We adjusted to being so broke that we couldn’t even afford to drive down the street and get a coke. Instead, we would stroll around the neighborhood, talking about plans and dreams for the future, or sometimes we’d walk in tense silence because there was too much that we might say to hurt each other. We began to learn how to fight fair, how to protect each other’s hearts and repair damage from words we couldn’t take back. We discovered how little we actually needed to own in order to have fun together.

We joined a church and found real family. We experienced a lot of firsts together, and not all of those firsts were pleasant. In a lot of ways, the struggle turned out to be a strong start for a lifetime together. I don’t imagine that a blissfully easy first year would have taught us nearly as much. Our hearts and minds fought some battles in those early months and years, with each other, with ourselves, with grownup life, with the temptation to sin in anger, or to become apathetic in frustration. God seemed to suddenly place us on the fast track to learning how to rely on Him, not just to learn how to be married, but to figure out how to pay the bills, and, maybe most importantly, how to be content with what we have in the moment.

The summer after we were married, it was hot in Nashville. I mean, scorching. We lived in our big old quirky rent house that had been abandoned when the owner was carted out to a nursing home. The house didn’t have air conditioning, but there was one window unit in the front room. For that entire summer and way into the fall, we would get ready for bed in the evenings and go to our bedroom and stand on either side of the ancient mattress we’d inherited from Chad’s grandmother. We each grabbed one side of it and half carried, half dragged it to the front room, where we slept on the floor in the only cool place in the house.

To us, it was normal and fine and even fun. When I think about us laughing and hauling that mattress to the front room every night, I can’t help but thank God for the struggle of such a shaky, beautifully heart-forming beginning. We learned to struggle side-by-side, and it has certainly served us well. After all, what is life but a series of struggles? In the midst of it all, how brightly God’s love shines in the funny, sweet, breath-taking moments. And how deep His love goes, even to the deepest depths of despair, when dark times threaten to overtake us. In all of this, He gave us friendship, weathered, tested, and found to be true. If we hadn’t learned to struggle in those early years, I’m not sure where we would have ended up when trials came later in life. I wish I could find that waitress we met on day four. Twenty-seven years later, I’d tell her not to be so cynical. God does great things through the struggle.