I am out of town this week and am reblogging some favorite stuff from the web while I spend time with my family at the happiest place on earth! See you on the other side.

Today’s installment comes to you from Sarah Bessey and was originally posted on 1/4/12.

It’s been nearly thirteen years since we fell in love, slow-dancing and kissing on the backroads of Tulsa, two teenagers crazy in love. Nearly eleven years since I ran down a chapel’s tiled aisle to you and nothing in our life looks the way that we thought it would or should because it’s all better than that, our dreams were too small, weren’t they?

You make me laugh and you make me think hard and new, your eyes follow only me when we walk through a crowded room, we can have entire conversations using just our eyebrows and the corner of my mouth, we laugh about how tired we are sometimes. We have gone to the high places and the low places, crossed the deserts, gained and lost and still we are dancing.

You have forgiven me when I could not forgive myself for how I had hurt you. I have held you up when you were sinking in the mires, praying joy into you. We are not perfect and sometimes, oh, I know we infuriate each other but there is that bone-deep knowing that we, this, all of it, is meant to be.

So this is what we do, we make each other better at being ourselves, better at being like Jesus, we slow-dance, my head on your heart, your breath in my hair, your hands on my wider-than-they-used-to-be hips, our feet slower perhaps because we’re moving together.

Sometimes the questions people ask or judgments they imply can make us chuckle, don’t they, my darling?

We are.

We are.

Only Jesus.

It’s a slow-dance still, isn’t it, my luv? You lead and I lead, we are both following His music, no hierarchy here. We move together, one body, all for intimacy and beauty, the dance of lovers that know every curve and lean into the unknown parts with full trust in the hands they hold.

I trust you completely, with every bit of our life, not because I must, not because any book commands it, not because God told me to submit, but because you earned it by loving me. And the thing that amazes some people is that you feel the same way for me, honoured among women, we submit to each other because we follow Him, we both practice playing second fiddle.

When it comes to the end, we both bear the responsibility for this love affair, for our family, for the work that we are both called to do and the love we are meant to spill out to show the God we know as Love.

You follow when I step out to a new place and I know when to slide into your new turn as a shadow and you lead us both through but usually, it’s just us, always us, trusting each other’s heart for the other, moving seamlessly, together.

It’s our embrace masquerading as a dance, our real marriage, accomplishing only loving as a picture of grace drawing near.