8/29/26
We are on day five of our cross-country road trip, headed toward our soon-to-be new home and a new life.
We’re down to the final six hours of a 36-hour journey.
Six hours until we pull into our new home.
Six hours until we begin the next chapter of this adventure.
And truly, that’s what our life has been—a series of adventures. Some amazing. Some not so amazing. Some we would gladly live all over again, and others we never would have chosen.
But isn’t that what life is?
We go through all of it—the best, the worst, and everything in between.
I haven’t really talked much about my marriage in all of this, but let me tell you—we have been through a lot in the twenty-one-plus years we’ve been married.
There were moments over the years when I honestly didn’t know if we would make it.
Our life together has not been easy. We have walked through things that tested us individually and tested our marriage in ways I never could have imagined when we first said, “I do.”
And yet, by the grace of God, here we are.
Still together.
Still choosing each other.
Still fighting for each other and for our marriage.
When I think about everything we have faced together—all the challenges, losses, changes, and major life transitions—I realize just how much we have survived.
Not because we’ve done everything right.
We haven’t.
We are far from perfect.
We have simply chosen to keep doing the hard work. To work on ourselves individually and to keep working on us as a couple.
And we’re still doing it.
We still face challenges. We still get things wrong. We still have places that need healing and areas where we need to grow.
Thankfully, we don’t have to do any of it alone.
We have the Lord walking alongside us through it all.
We still have work to do. After everything we have been through, how could we not?
Maybe we always will.
But each morning we wake up and make a choice.
We choose to love each other.
We choose to keep showing up.
We choose to keep trying to love one another the way Jesus loves us—with grace, forgiveness, patience, and a willingness to begin again.
As we drive these final miles toward a new home and a new chapter, I can’t help but think about where all of this is leading.
If we keep the Lord first and continue relying on Him to guide us, I have faith that someday life might become a little simpler.
And maybe one day we’ll get the opportunity to sit together on our porch in a couple of old rocking chairs and look back over this life we built together.
The beautiful parts.
The painful parts.
The things we overcame.
The lessons we learned.
The memories we made.
And maybe, looking back from that porch, we’ll finally be able to see how God used all of it.
And we’ll know that none of it was wasted.
That somehow, through every adventure, every heartbreak, every new beginning, and every time we chose not to give up, it all had a purpose.
“I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go.”
— Song of Solomon 3:4
Unpolished Truth 