We Were Married 9 Years Ago Today!

It hardly seems possible, but the calendar doesn't lie. 8/8/98, the coolest wedding date ever, was nine whole years ago.
I love this man! I love being married to him! It is a dream being his wife!
I walked into the kitchen this morning to find a lovely arrangement of white roses. He proposed to me with white roses, so I still get them from time to time.
We have a journal that we write to each other in, and at the bottom of his journal entry, he wrote "...after nine years, we haven't lost us. We never will."
What a comfort to hear those words!
We teach about marriage in our ministry called Countdown, and so we are called out, semester after semester, to practice what we preach.
One thing we know for sure, is we have to be intentional about not "losing us." That was much easier when we had no, or fewer, kids. Oh, how we love the little people in our house! They are a pure blessing from the Lord, but they will suck the life out of our marriage if we let them. They would take as much as we give them, and our kids have grown up thus far knowing that there is time and space that belongs to Mommy and Daddy alone. For us, that is date night! We know, FOR US, that we need this. We need to sit across the table from one another, somewhere outside of our house, away from the place where laundry, bills, un-returned e-mails, and yet-to-be-dictated charts loom. We need to look at one another and talk. We often do a lot of catching up on Friday nights. It's not that we're holding anything back from each other during the week, it's just that a busy life and a house full of kids tends to sweep us up, and we are trying to shout at each other through the noise futilely. We must make sacred time for our marriage. We crave it. And our children are blessed by it as well.
Our marriage is not new anymore. Sadly, we can no longer claim to be newlyweds. The newness has been replaced with other wonderful things...like familiarity, the ability to mind-read, and our lives pre-each other drifting so far away, we can hardly remember it.
We are still learning! We seem to take something new from Countdown every semester that we teach it, and we are embarking on Countdown 10!!! (Hard to believe!) We learn how to raise the bar higher according to God's Word, and not the world's standards. I still have so far to go in learning how to serve and love Rusty the way I should.
But it's a joy learning alongside, and being loved by, my husband. I'm immensely grateful for 3,285 days of being Mrs. Rusty Bacak. I hope for thousands upon thousands more!