If you saw the face of God and love would you change?  —Tracy Chapman

The scene: last Thursday, 6 pm, our kitchen.  Bowl full of dried out cookie dough on the counter.  The characters: me, dumping the ruined dough in the sink with a guttural, roof-shaking sigh spiked with some unflattering language.  The Husband, telling me that it would be okay, that we would survive without cookies.  My response: “No, we won’t.”

And the Oscar for best melodramatic performance by a jackass goes to…this guy.

I never cease to be shocked by how little it takes to make me fall apart.  On this occasion, for instance, I had worked until 1 pm then came home and took a rare long nap.  After a workout, I had nothing in front of me but a night in and a batch of cookies to make–not for hungry orphans, but just so that TH and I could eat them.  Then I forgot to keep the flour and sugar mixtures separate and all hell broke loose.  I tossed bowls in the sink and threw the mixer against the cabinet.  I stomped around a two-by-two foot area.  I breathed heavily.  I acted like a child.

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for so many things: a new life, a new home, contractors, modern medicine.  But most of all I’m thankful for my husband, who is the greatest gift I never earned.

I remember a night shortly after we met, when we were sharing cheese fries at a diner.  I told him the story of The Worst Thing I Ever Did, and he listened.  I finished my story and he was still there.  I went to the bathroom and came back and he was still there.  My jaded thought was, “Hmm.  This guy must have some pretty wicked secrets himself.”  And you know what?  Three years later, I have yet to find any.  When the voice at the drive-thru asks for his order, he says hello and asks how they’re doing.  When he gets cut off in traffic, he mentions nothing about the driver carrying out a personal agenda to ruin his day.  He believes there is more than one side to every story.  He greets the people he passes on the sidewalk.  His first order of business at our new house is to replace all the broken locks so we’ll be safe.

He puts up with me.

Look, I’m not trying to beat myself down here.  Because of my faith, I know–and I mean, know–my worth as a person is infinite and I am loved beyond what I can imagine.  All I’m saying is, to see the same grace that played out on a tree two thousand years ago being played out daily in my marriage is…humbling.  And I hope I never close my eyes to it.  The fact is that something(One) brought the two of us together for a purpose, and now there’s no way either of us can be whom we were made to be without the other.  Which is an awesome responsibility and one I’m thankful that I believe is true because it means I am also designed to contribute to this relationship in ways that, standing over a bowl of ruined dough, may elude me but are no less real.

On Sunday I heard a man speak about a time in his life when he reached a dead end and was “broken enough to be open.”  I thought of That Bad Period in My Life and how it brought me to the same place–broken and finally open.  Open to have nothing of my own effort left to hold onto.  Open to the reality that I was no longer the Perfect Girl I had always tried to be–in fact, further from her than I had ever thought possible.  Open to the truth that in the middle of the big fat gross mess I had made of things, I was loved beyond what I had ever known until I got to that mess.  And now I am standing in the daily reflection of the ultimate truth that the ugliest stuff I am and I’ve done was never my destiny.

So on Thursday night, faced with the indulgent idea of pouting and crying just a little bit more in the face of The Husband’s unconditional, non-cookie-requiring love, I took a moment.  Disney filmmakers and I have something in common, and that is our belief that two-dimensional characters representing All Good and All Evil have grown tiresome and unrealistic.  BUT: I know that while there may not be little red men with pitchforks behind every corner, there is a destructive force–that even runs through me when I let it–that is bent on every Cookie Dough Debacle being my ultimate defeat.  The end of my faith in something better.  The end of my hope in redemption.  This is war, and I may only be armed with a wooden spoon and a hand mixer but I am showing up ready to fight–knowing that I can make the hell out of some Keurig coffee and a bed, that I always remember to bring the shopping list, and that sometimes I can even calmly rinse the bowls and start over on the cookies.  I am who I am because I am loved.  And might I just say, that was the best batch of cookies I ever made.