This is an open letter to my husband, in case there are any women out there caught in shades of grey.

U R My Lover, and I’ve loved you in a thousand ways. I’ve known your strength like arms carrying my lifeless body limp. I’ve worn our weaknesses like second skin, the way marriage brings them to the surface. I’ve laid my head upon your chest when it has been the only place on earth that I can rest.

U R My Friend, and when we are tangled in the bed sheets, you have always been gentle with me. Our children have been born from tenderness and faithfulness. Never, not once, has there been fear or shame on those holy sheets of ours.

Fifty hues of that kind of love makes a lifetime to be proud of.  Not just moments of pleasure — a legacy of the real love that makes families last.

Fifteen priceless years ago, I floated down the aisle fixed on your gaze, magnetic.

I smirked on our wedding day, the videographer caught it up close, how I shrugged and grinned sheepish when the pastor said pressure would come — was bound to come — and how in the hard times the hard choice would be to love harder.

That magnetic pull followed you over hills as big as Texas, into five homes where you made us a good living.  We moved cross country and started over, grass greener, while demons chased our heels hoping to take us out when we weren’t looking. (They didn’t succeed.)

With hearts raw and torn, we made love, fighting with heaven for our wedding day to win when all odds were against us. Whether in plenty or in want, we made more love than losses, and we made love win because we chose it. 

Oh ya, 50 hues of that kind of love. 500.  5000. 5 million, More. Unquenchable, the way real love reaches for each other in the times when you are being torn apart by the mess … when the bravest thing is to hold on, to hold tight, and take a bulldozer through the uneven earth so grace can rain over all the beat-up parts and all the less-than-perfects and wash what’s not complete.

What if Gospel Grace is the language of the bed sheets we share? What if the ring around our finger is the ring of God’s love around us when we don’t think we can go on?

When the dreams get shaky and could crumble and the gaze gets lost in the pain of two imperfect people wanting perfect?  Then what?  Then Jesus.

Fixing our gaze on Jesus, makes us love the perfect kind. The kind of love tethered to the God who makes all things possible. God gives us the heart to love in the face of a not-so-perfect life, which doesn’t look like postcards or magazines or movies that don’t always paint the picture of true, messy love.

True love is perfect because its faithful and it’s gentle and it’s real and it’s grace-filled … and it’s safe.

“His eyes are like doves besides streams of water.” (SS 5:12)  Bed sheets warm and holding us in God’s embrace, I pass through those eyes and dive beyond the enigma of what I’m not, and for that moment all the world around us disappears and all is complete and it doesn’t matter that we haven’t followed all the rules.

What matters is U R my Safe Place.  This is holy matrimony. This is beauty, and this is God in you and through you showing me I’ll never be alone.

U R My Best Friend because I picked you when the picking was real — when the pressure came like a tornado hissing in the wind, when it was the bravest choice and the very, very best one — to love long, and to make it last even if we had to make it all over.

“Keep dreaming, baby …” you said to me in the morning light, like you don’t even know what it’s meant for you to let me dream, like you don’t even know you are the one who gave my dreams wings because you let me forge this crazy path, getting all torn up trying to find my way, because you knew I just had to make a road where there wasn’t one before.

Fifty hues of real love: being safe to dream, knowing your hands will never hurt me, that “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me,” that “Mighty waters cannot extinguish love; rivers cannot sweep it away.” (SS 8:3; 7)

How about picking love when my body changes and I don’t look like that girl on our wedding day and on some days I don’t feel like her either. How about love that lasts through that too? How about 50 shades of it, five million more.

We who press in to Jesus are pressing on. We are believing that love is made up in moments and made to last through time, through the endlessness of time, all the way into eternity, when His love fills in all the gaps and makes all things well and right and whole.

Fifty hues of that kind of love makes a lifetime to be proud of.  Not just moments of pleasure — a legacy of the real love that makes families last.

To my Husband: thank you for being My Lover, My Friend, my Safe Place. 

Forever and Always,