A Cool Story

I am in the 6th grade and I’m stepping out of our family station wagon. My mom always made sure I had everything I needed for school. I am carrying a brown paper sack with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a Little Debbie cake. In my pocket is a little bit of change to buy a carton of milk. My school had the cardboard kind that if you did not get it open on the first try, it was impossible to open!

I am wearing a freshly pressed pair of blue jeans and a button-up shirt. My hair is neatly combed to the side. My mom even made me wear a white t-shirt under my shirt because gentlemen wear t-shirts! She even dropped me off early to make a good impression.

When you are early to my school in the winter you have to wait in the large lunchroom for the first bell to ring. So I find an empty table and sit down. I put my lunch sack and my bookbag on the table beside me.

It’s my first year of middle school and I am finding out about all the different social groups that kids get into. There are the jocks (athletic kids), the cool kids, the troublemakers, the outcasts, and the nerds (who rule the world now)! The thing is, I just don’t fit in with any of them, but I want to be one of the cool kids. Sometimes we call it “bad”, which doesn’t really mean bad but more like extremely good!? The cool kids are the popular kids, the ones that have everything in middle school. They had friends. They didn’t sit at tables by themselves.

That’s when it happened, a moment that would change my life. I notice one of the cool kids from the other side of the lunchroom walking towards me. He comes up to my table and sits down across from me. I am thinking that this could finally be my chance to become cool. So now I am nervous.

He looks at me and leans over the table. I can’t believe this is actually happening. He asks me a question, “do you want to know how to be cool”? I said “sure”, but inside I am screaming, “Yes, please, please tell me how”! So he grabs his shirt, then points to mine and says with a cruel smirk on his face, “never let people see your white t-shirt.” Then he just stands up and walks off. For a 6th grader who wants so desperately to be cool, this hit me like a ton of bricks! So I look down and sure enough, my white t-shirt is showing at the top. This doesn’t seem like a big deal but apparently it is.

Now I am completely embarrassed and humiliated. I feel like everyone in the lunchroom has noticed my white t-shirt. The only way to cover it up would be to button my shirt all the way up, which would make me look like what we call a “dork” and I definitely don’t want to be one of those! So I am going to have to somehow make it through this day.

At that moment I knew I would never be with the cool people. It hurt, but I learned something that day. It’s something that I wouldn’t fully realize until years later. I don’t have to be like anyone else. I don’t have to fit in. I learned that I am only really good at one thing, that’s being me. And being me is OK because the “me” is the person that the infinite God in Heaven created.

I think that many people miss this in marriage and in life. Being you is the most important thing because you are the person your spouse fell in love with. And you are the person who can love your spouse as no one else can.

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”

A. A. Milner (Winnie the Pooh)

Love is about you loving and being loved. It’s about accepting and being accepted for who you are as a person.

When you were little, you heard your first love story, and from that moment, your mind started racing to have your own. You want to find just the right person to love. Just the right person to love you. And when you find them, your life becomes completely unhinged. You leave behind everything because love is the one thing in life that feels right.

But every love story has doubts. Maybe it’s in the big question that most people think but never speak out loud. Did I marry the wrong person?

So did you marry the wrong person? Let’s answer that question right now together…

You Are Married to the Wrong Person Because Your Expectations Have Made them Wrong

It’s not that the person you choose to marry is wrong for you, it’s that you made expectations for that person and your love that are unattainable. Love takes you to another dimension of life. It transports you to a place where nothing matters. If you could live off love, you might be set for life, but you still have to do life and life is what can become the enemy of love.

There Are No Hollywood Endings

Every girl wants to find her knight in shining armor and every guy wants to find his princess. And then you realize the knight and shining armor doesn’t always have a shining armor. Or the princess doesn’t always look like a princess.

Life Happens

The truth is that love is awesome, but it is not always pretty. Life and love get messy sometimes, that is when love is tested and strengthened. We talked about this a few weeks ago in the lesson entitled Why Is Love So Messy? Marriage is not an endless stream of romantic moments and doesn’t always have a happy ending.

Things happen that get in the way of happiness. It’s just like the wedding vows that people make without thinking twice about them: In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse. New love makes us only see health, riches, and better. But sickness, poorer, and worse are all coming soon because life is made to bring them. Your expectations don’t include these things, so you think that your love is a disappointment. And you ask, “Am I married to the right person?”

Family Happens

I like to think about the love story of Adam and Eve. They were completely alone together. It was like an endless honeymoon. Until one day Eve gets morning sickness and a baby bump! Then everything changes for them. When you start a family, it’s like life starts fast-forwarding. At the end of the day, you are just too exhausted for a romantic evening together. So your love has to adjust.

You wake one morning and you realize that all the expectations are completely demolished. When I said “I do”, I was saying “I do” to being hopelessly lost and totally in love for the rest of my life. Not caught up in a whirlwind of endless chores and hardships! Then you think about all the things that are missing in your love life and you ask, “Am I married to the right person?”

Disappointment Happens

Love is this crazy balance of amazingness and disappointment. When life doesn’t go like you envisioned it throws everything off. It makes you wonder what is wrong but there is nothing wrong. Disappointments are designed to grow your love and to change you. Loving my wife makes me a better person. Learning to stay in love with her makes me a better Christian.

You may not have a fairy tale love story, but you have each other. Your expectation should be in the commitment that you made to your spouse and to God. So if I am not happy right now, I have to learn how to love in that disappointment.

God should be disappointed in me. I know He has good plans for me but I mess them up all the time. Yet, He still loves me. That’s because he loves the person I am, not what I do for Him, or how I make Him feel.

We have these expectations for each other that are not realistic. Your only expectation in marriage should be to love your spouse.

You Will Have Disagreements

Everything that moves creates friction. Two lives connected together in marriage are bound to produce some kind of friction. Sometimes an argument can bring something to light in your marriage that you would not have seen otherwise. Maybe the reason I fight with my spouse is that I have selfish expe...