I drove through the roughest rainstorm I’ve ever encountered on my way home from work yesterday.  Torrential downpour doesn’t begin to describe it.  Sheets of rain and hail pounded the roof of my car.  I was stuck at 30 mph, likely an irrationally high speed given the conditions.  I could barely see the taillights of the car in front of mine.  My windshield wipers were on their highest setting.  I kept hitting puddles and skidding a bit as my tires sprayed walls of water in every direction. Then I watched a lightning bolt hit a transformer.  Sparks flew up in the air and I wondered what it meant…until I looked up and saw the traffic light ahead blow out.  Flatline.

In the split-second before whatever backup system was in place kicked in and the light changed to flashing yellow on my side, I felt a jolting combination of freedom and panic.  Freedom, because I was no longer expressly subject to traffic laws.  Panic, because no one else was either.

I think one of the biggest mistakes we can make in life is to abide by the idea that “that won’t happen to me” or its cousin, “that just isn’t us.”  I remember talking to people right after I got engaged about wedding planning and listening to their horror stories: late-night fights, desperate tears, occasional bloodshed.  I heard stories of caterers who didn’t show up, bands who were late, in-laws who were a chromosome short of pure alien.  I listened politely, nodding my head and wincing with the storyteller in the right spots.  Then walking away and thinking to myself, How sad.  To get that caught up in one event.  I’m so glad we’re not them.

Oh, how gently but heartily God must have laughed.

If the first test of married life is getting married, I need a remedial course.  I have made a business of majoring on the minors and making mountains out of molehills and, generally, losing my shit over every tiny detail.  I have uttered phrases that, were they to have come from someone else’s mouth, would have left me at best rolling my eyes and at worst, throwing up in my mouth. Phrases like “I feel so alone” and “I do everything.  Everything!” and “BECAUSE CHICKEN FINGERS ARE AN AWESOME FOOD, THAT”S WHY!”  My self-obsessed delirium reached a head last night and left me waking up in a state of pure yuck, leading to a car prayer time full of grace and tears.  Because sometimes, He opens my eyes to what life would look like if the storm knocked all the lights out, if redemption hadn’t happened, if I were the one in the drivers seat.  If it really were all about me.

And it is ug-uh-LEE, as my grandmother used to say.  It looks like a home that is a place to escape from rather than a refuge.  It looks like a lover who becomes foreign rather than friend.  It looks like a wall of mistrust.  It looks like having no place to go and no one who understands you.  It looks like navigating every storm alone.

This really isn’t about wedding planning.  I’ll be honest, I’m not going to apologize for wanting things a certain way when I have waited THIRTY-THREE YEARS for this day and this man.  (Although on a good day, I will admit that there is usually a more graceful way to go about letting my opinion be known than whichever way I chose.)  What this is about is life.  About all the ways I’m being asked to deny myself for a reason I can’t see through the rain.  Usually, for someone else’s good.  Being in a relationship, whether it’s as a lover or a wife or a parent or a friend, means constantly choosing to be better than I really am.  Because, just like John Casey told Chuck, the bad guys don’t take a day off.  And I refuse to be a sitting duck at target practice. Thirty miles an hour may be slow as hell, but at least I’m moving in the direction of home.