The Marriage Abbey

She is Gospel.

No, she is not the actual four accounts of Christ in the New Testament. She’s my experience of them. This is how:

I have seen her transform so often and so brightly in her vocation and endeavors—wife, student, mother—that I wonder if Christ meant for the awe of Transfiguration to be commonplace and ongoing.

I’ve never once feared that anything that upsets me couldn’t be dispersed by opening my heart to her; she is my rock and nothing will prevail against her fidelity.

We apologize often for little mistakes, but I can’t count even seven times I had to deeply forgive her, let alone seventy-times-seven. Her core goodness endures, and her humility always makes it so easy to forgive.

She is a type of Simon of Cyrene, but no one obliges her to help carry my cross. Her actions are often so self-sacrificing that I sometimes have to snatch back some of my cross.

My spirits around her are so light and unburdened because she frees me with her loyalty, devotion, and faithfulness. We may as well be walking on water. Perhaps the same kind of qualities in her compelled Peter to briefly walk on water toward Christ. But we’re still walking.

I don’t have to be the prodigal son for her to welcome me home every day to a feast.

She eats meals with me, a sinner.

I lived a dark and frustrated spirituality prior to meeting her. She multiplied the meager five loaves and two fishes’ worth of hope I could muster in my former darkness, and here we are still fully satiated eleven years later. We have yet to become “Oldyweds”.

I’d trade thirty pieces of silver to spend one day with her, let alone a lifetime. And I did. My hometown is no tech mecca but I remained here to be near her as she finished college. Now I have no dreams of silicon valleys or cityscapes or elaborate research complexes. I have an acre plot on a meadow surrounded by forest and prairie. We live small because we’d rather love large. I betrayed my silly dreams and won the priceless gift Christ offers in her.

So if somehow God does not grant my wife passage into heaven, it would be because He hasn’t read His book.

But I know He will lead her to salvation. Because through Christ’s redeeming work, she is the best news I’ve ever received.

She is Gospel.