Last week, Stephen and I flew to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to shoot a destination wedding.  Before leaving for the trip, we had project after project after project to complete for our design business, REmix Design & Media.  We had many 5am nights just trying to keep up with it all.  We were neglecting friendships.  We were eating for convenience,  not healthy fuel.  We weren’t setting aside time for quiet time with the Lord.  We were literally like robots going from bed to desk, a few kitchen breaks to grab the closest food, back to desk, then to bed.  For weeks we didn’t have any quality time, and our relationship had become nothing more than business partners trying to get done as much as we could.  When we started this journey with REmix, we cast our nets out in faith that God would fill it, and didn’t expect the abundance that He filled in our nets.  It was almost too much than we could keep up with.  We were beyond stressed trying to keep up with it all and keep our clients happy, that we lost track of the most important thing… keeping ourselves happy and our marriage healthy grounded in keeping God first.

So when we got to St. John, and breathed in the air of paradise, we knew, we needed to turn this business trip into a personal marriage retreat as well and stay a few days longer than expected.  We knew that if we didn’t get our priorities back in order, we were going to slowly deteriorate when we returned.

Our first thing to address?  Get off social media.  Following the wedding, we made a pact to not Instagram until we got back.  Yes, we were in paradise and wanted to share every glorious sunset and ocean landscape.  Yes, we worried Facebook would crash if we didn’t check in at least 500 times a day.  Yes, our businesses might fail if we didn’t address clients email with in the 24 hour period we normally try to.  But we were willing to take that risk in order to simply….. breathe.  And de-stress.  And get our priorities back in order.  Sometimes you just have to take a stance for what’s truly important.

So without advertising it to the world, we took adventures both on sea and land.  We snorkeled.  We swam with nurse sharks, and sting rays and petted sea turtles who swam along side us.  We walked around the quiet little town of St. John holding hands and dancing in the streets because we could.  And though we had cell service, we left our phones in the hotel room.  Because really, what was most important were the memories we were creating, not the buzz of the phone telling us we had a new text/email/social media update from somebody else pulling at us.

We also used this time to discuss changes we were going to make upon returning.  One of them was creating what we call our “S&S Guidelines For Sanity”.  Previously, we saw this floating around Instagram through our own wedding photographers and other friends, and we knew we had reached our breaking point of needing to do the same.  This guidelines sheet, now on our fridge, includes things like NORMAL business hours, which yes, for us means getting up earlier and going to bed earlier AND shutting the office door behind us when it’s time to stop work at 6pm.  It also includes the simple things like taking time for bike rides to clear our head on a daily basis.  And making dinner together, not just scouring up something from the fridge individually and plopping in front of the TV to eat.  Or worse, eating dinner at our desk because we just can’t say no to our computers.

We know it’s so normal to let work rule your life, especially for us, as a husband and wife who work together. But yet…. we want something more than the normal.  We know it’s easy to stay in the comfortable, doing what every one does, letting the rat race consume their everything and work success be their greatest treasure.  But what we learned in the midst of our snorkeling adventures is that the greatest treasure is not along the shore in the safety zone where everyone else hangs out.  It’s in the part that requires you to leave the safety of the shore and swim out to the quiet reefs in the middle of nowhere.

One of our adventures in St. John took us to a place only the locals know about.  While St. John is made up of lots of gorgeous bays, and most are public for the average tourist, we kept asking locals where the best snorkeling spot was, and that was Waterlemon Cay.  Yet, to get there, it’s about a half hour walk down a private trail from where you park.  Then, once you arrive at the beach, you have to walk over the rocky sand to get to the water to swim. Then, to experience the best part, you have to swim out over the deep blue out to a small tiny tiny island (or what they call a “cay”), and that’s where you will find all the beautiful reefs, fish and other majestic glories God created.

As I looked at the trail of the unknown ahead of me walking to this random beach, I didn’t know if I had it in me to walk all that way just to snorkel.

Once we arrived, and I looked at how far the cay was from where we had to start our swim, I didn’t know if I had it in me to swim all that way.

As we began our swim, and all I saw was deep blue underneath me, all I could think was “Please Lord, don’t let us see a shark.”

As Stephen and I paused half way in the midst of our swim, we questioned if the long swim was worth it. Especially, with no lifeguard on duty, it probably wasn’t the smartest choice.  What if one of us got a cramp, got stung by a jelly fish/sting ray/eaten by a shark (my mind always goes to worst case scenerio naturally)?  Yet, we reached out our hands, and held each other up and kept swimming alongside each other with encouragement and faith that after all we heard about this cay, that it would be worth leaving our safety zone.

Then we arrived.  And the deep blue turned into detail.  Colorful detail.  Textured detail.  Spotted detail.  Moving detail.  We saw the beauty of the coral, and a rainbow of thousands of fish swimming all around us as if we were just one big fish amongst them.  We saw one magnificent creature after another including hundreds of giant starfish I had never seen before. We saw this crazy amazing world that lives beyond what our eye can see when looking out into the water or above from an airplane.  It was simply breathtaking.  And that doesn’t even begin to describe it.

And had we stayed on the shore, we would have missed all that.  Had we chosen comfort and to not go against the normal, we would have missed the greatest treasure of all.  And like our marriage and the norm of busy lives, we knew it was time to make changes against what had become our norm before we missed out on the greatest treasures ahead of us in the years to come.

This morning, I read in a new devotion book I’m reading, “A Sudden Glory,” about a very similar parallel that I just had to share here:

“Passion comes easy during those years when youths dive into the sea of new discoveries with reckless abandon. But as we surface to breathe in the air of adulthood, we tend to float along the current of Christianity and swim in the school of other like-minded saints.  That’s not a bad place to be.  It is safe.  But it is the bold and the brave who venture from the saintly swarm, venture into the deep sea of grace, and explore the depths of God’s fathomless wonder.  Treasures in the deep are waiting to be discovered by those willing to leave the surface and plunge headlong into God’s all-encompassing presence.”

We’re plunging headlong this week to take steps toward change.  What changes do you need to make as well so that you don’t miss God’s greatest treasures ahead of you?

Here’s a little bit of the beauty we saw in Waterlemon Cay.  All images shot with our GoPro Hero 3 camera.

Ephesians 4:32

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

The other day as I was catching up with a dear friend, who is single, and she sat in the car and told me, “You and Stephen just have the perfect marriage, I hope to find that one day.”  I just laughed and said “Are you kidding me?”  Perfect?  Far from it.  We’re married.  That statement alone means there are ups and downs and good and bad and for better and for worse.  She went onto say how she loves following our lives on social media and seeing our picture perfect life and how in love we are and how inspiring it is… and while I want her to be inspired and know that true love is worth the wait….I also want her to know that true love also is worth fighting for.  Because no love is perfect.  Love is a continual growing process.  It is a continual sacrifice of selfishness, of putting someone’s needs above your own, of his ways vs my ways, of compromise, and all the un-picture perfect things that no one shares on social media.

I was telling her the story of my lesson learning what a facade Facebook can be.  I had an old girlfriend from high school who I had lost touch with, yet, we were Facebook friends, and I would check in from time to time to see how happy and beautiful her family had grown.  I was so happy to see her so happy.  Finally we reached out beyond Facebook to get together to catch up.  As we met in person, I learned that those super glossy smiley family photos I was complimenting her on?  Those were the result of the absolute worst time in their family’s life after a year of separation from her husband, and they were currently in a phase of trying to rebuild and forgive, so they took the family photos as part of their attempt to heal that messy moment in their marriage.  I remember being in shock.  And of course my heart broke for her.  And it was my wake up call to what a facade Facebook can be.

The hardest lesson I have learned from our 2 years of marriage is how much marriage is a reflection of my own personal walk with Jesus.  Marriage requires constant forgiveness.  It requires accountability and choosing to keep things in the light, not the dark.  It requires daily communication.  It requires choosing to be a reflection of Christ’s love to the other person, even more so in those moments where you really don’t want to.  It requires trusting someone else with all your vulnerabilities, and hoping they still choose to love you despite how many times you fail to give a perfect love to them.  And when it can feel impossible to forgive your spouse, those are the exact moments Christ wants to remind us that it’s most important to forgive because the bottom line is….. He forgave us.  How can we know that and not extend the same grace to our partner in life?  I am so thankful for that grace.  His absolutely amazing grace.

And the greatest lesson I’ve learned about marriage is that, in the end, it’s worth fighting for until the end.  This lesson I learned from watching my parent’s marriage play out until the end.  They had many up and time moments throughout their 34 years of marriage.  I watched so many times how God had to completely shatter them apart in order to restore and rebuild.  And despite all the broken moments…. I have never seen a love more beautiful than between them the last 8 months of my dad’s life.  In those closing moments of their love story, I witnessed that love is completely worth fighting for.  To be able to hold someone’s hand until their last breath.  To look back over the story of their love and know they lived their love to the fullest.  To know that each time they forgave, it was brought with so many more beautiful memories that they what wouldn’t have been able to experience had they taken the easy way out to run away.  To see that in the end moments of life, what’s important is not what you have accomplished or how much money you made, but what is important is how strongly you loved and made a difference in the life of someone else through your love.  And in the natural moments of marriage where disagreements happen, where hurts happen, where confrontation happens and the last thing I want to do is keep my vows I made to my husband, I close my eyes and think of watching my parents fight for their love until the very last breath, and the legacy of forgiveness they set before me.  That is the perfect marriage I want people to know Stephen and I have, not something glossy they see on social media.  That our marriage is not perfect because we are perfect and appear to be fairy tale like, but that our love is built on perfect forgiveness and grace just as Christ forgave us individually first.

And while I know not every marriage is redeemable, if you have come from a broken one, my greatest hope is that you too can one day be in a marriage that is braided together with three strands: you, your spouse and Christ.  Because a cord of three strands can not be easily broken (Ecclesiastes 4:12)

Before getting married, I saw a movie that completely left a huge impact in my life of the kind of marriage I hoped to have one day… one that fights for each other… that doesn’t give up when all signs point to the door… and one that is fireproof.  If you haven’t seen this movie, whether married or single, I highly recommend it, even with all it’s cheesiness.

Stephen and I were recently visiting family in Seattle and as part of staying there, we get to see and hang out with our nephews and niece Norah, as pictured above.  On our last day, Norah, 3 years old, wanted some cereal, and here’s the dialogue that was exchanged between she and her dad.

“Daddy, I want cereal.”

“No, Norah.  We’re out of milk.”

“But Daddy, I SAID I want cereal.”

“And Norah, I SAID there’s no milk.”

Immediately, Norah broke out in tears and pouted and ran to the corner because she didn’t get her way.  As my heart broke watching my sweet little niece get sooooo upset over not getting her way, at the same time, I sat there thinking, I’m no different when it comes to my relationship with my Heavenly father.  When I ask something from God, and I don’t get it, I throw my own pity party.  I pout.  I get depressed.  I may even break out in tears.  Usually, actually, I break out in tears.  And the part that frustrates me the most is having to deal with not understanding the “why” behind the “no”, instead of just trusting my Heavenly Father knows best.

The situation with Norah and her dad came following a night where I found out the reason to a “Why not?” that I had been wondering for over 10 years.  I went through a situation in my early 20s where I went through a lot of hurt.  It wasn’t so much that the hurt came from a person, but it was more my frustration of asking God “WHY NOT?”  I hated not knowing the answer why God wasn’t answering a lot of prayers I prayed back then.  I had to chalk it up to simply being my life version of Garth Brooks’ song “Unanswered Prayers” and trust that everything happens for a reason, even if we don’t understand it.  Sometimes we just have to accept that God not answering a prayer is an answer to prayer in and of itself.  He sees the big picture.  He wants to protect us.  He wants to give us better than our own limited view of what we see in front of us.  He wants us to trust that when He doesn’t answer prayers, it’s because He has a reason why, whether or not we ever find out the answer.

Yet, now totally unrelated, I’m back in that place.  As I sit here praying for something that feels like is going unanswered, I’m having to trust all over again with every fiber in my being.  And it’s killing me.  And most days I don’t like it.  And I want to pout and cry and go hide in the corner like my little niece.  Yet, I then remember I’m 32, not 3, and realize how thankful I am for the grace that God continues to love me despite my own temper tantrums.