20 Year Anniversary

{pc: my grandpa jerry}

Josh and I celebrated our twenty year dating anniversary last weekend.

Twenty years. It feels unreal.

Can it really be that it was two decades ago that he would hold my hand and walk me to my car (a cherry red 1970 Volvo station wagon) in the Mountain View parking lot after school? When he worked at Papa Murphey's making pizza on Friday and Saturday nights while I baby-sat the Pirkl kids.

It feels impossible that I will be 38 this year. That we have four kids. That two of them are middle schoolers.  That we're done having babies.  That I blinked, and suddenly we have the life I always dreamed of, and now our kids are approaching the ages we were when we met.

No joke, four years from now, the twins will be sixteen.  The same age Josh was when I met him.

It takes my breath away.

I watched our wedding video last Friday (with all the time we have on our hands) and a couple things stood out.

One, we were so young. My god, so young.

Two, we were so confident. So sure of our love.

And three, I was so thin.  And I had no idea.

My takeaway from the reminiscing was that I should fully embrace this moment, because looking back on it later, I will feel fondly for whatever the circumstances are.  I should love this home, this body, this day... because one day it will just be a memory, likely a fond one.  And today's all we got.

***

Josh,

I love you.  
I've known I loved you since about three weeks after I met you, 
and it's only grown deeper since then. 

I love you for teaching me that I can be brave.  That I can take risks.  That I can do something hard when it's the right thing to do. Leaving my church (my home for ten  years) for you was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I knew you were the one for me, and that God handpicked you for me. He told me so.

But if I wanted to claim that prize, if I wanted a future with you in it, I had to choose. I had to be brave.  Glennon Doyle says, "Brave means listening to the still small voice inside and doing as it says.  Regardless of what the rest of the world is saying.  Brave implies wisdom...  Sometimes brave means letting everyone else down but yourself."  That is definitely what this felt like.  And I am so glad I was true to myself, to you, to us.

Because look at what we've built.

We could have missed this.

And I'm so glad we didn't.

I love you forever & always.

~Shelly

***

"What a terrible waste of life it is,

to always take the easy path,

to never know what it is 

to risk everything

for what you love."

-Beau Taplin

"You were a risk,

a mystery,

and the most certain thing I'd ever known."

-Beau Taplin

"You are the poem I never knew how to write

and this life is the story I have always wanted to tell."

-Tyler Knott Gregson

***