Together in Sickness and Health

Twenty-five years ago, Greg and I said "I do" on a Saturday afternoon in my home church. I'm not sure why we had it in the afternoon? Most of his family was coming in from out of town so perhaps we thought the afternoon time would keep them from staying overnight. I don't think it made any difference, but I'm sure it sounded like a good idea at the time.

We were so young and in-love and we were the first of our friends get married, so we had a pretty traditional wedding: church, indoor reception with bags of bird seed to throw at us. Does anyone even do bird seed anymore? Now it is outdoor weddings, funny vows, dancing down the aisle, sparklers, bubbles, and so many more creative ideas.

We also didn't write our own vows. My uncle, who was a pastor, married us and we exchanged the traditional vows: "Do you Jamie take Greg together in holy matrimony to be your husband? To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and cherish from this day forward until death do us part?" Those words take only a few moments to say but then you spend the rest of your life trying to live them out.

The last five years have been a season of struggle and trauma as my husband has suffered from occipital neuralgia which caused severe headaches and neck pain. In the beginning, the headaches were occasional, but for the last two years, he has suffered daily without any relief from medicine or any other treatment. His only treatment was to heat or ice on his neck and lay down until they went from a 9 to a 7 or an 8 to a 6. And it wasn't all physical sickness, it even encompassed his mental health. At one point, Greg had a reaction to a medicine and he started suffering debilitating anxiety and dread. It took us months to determine that the medicine was the cause and there were days I was afraid to leave him alone. And when he would suffer one of these anxiety attacks, he would end up laying on the floor, often in tears, from the pain in his head and the anxiety in his chest and I would just sit next to him, praying over him and asking God to heal him.

We tried all the alternative and medical treatments but we didn't have a diagnosis until just this past Spring, so it was a long season of being "in sickness." He recently had surgery to relieve the compressed nerves that were causing his pain and we believe that we are finally on the road to recovery. We know that God is good and that all of this was for our good and his glory but it was the hardest thing I've ever gone through.

This has tested our faith, our family and our marriage but we are still together. . It was truly traumatic and exhausting and the only reason we got through it was by God's grace and strength. Yet it strengthened our marriage to a level I didn't think was possible. I thought we had a good marriage but now there is a deepness to our relationship that didn't exist before. When you first get married, you hope that you will truly be able to love each other through all the hard times but you never know until you go through one together. Greg and I had been through plenty of tough moments - our son Cole's heart condition being a big one - but we had never experienced something like this. And even though Greg endured the pain, we went through the rest together.

Marriage becomes the action by which we live out the idea of "together." Together we put Christ as the center of our relationship and make him the foundation for our family. Together, we mutually submit and love each other as Christ loved us. Together we laugh, cry, fight, makeup, learn and grown. Together we raise a family. Together we share Jesus with others. All of this together is so much easier in health than it is in sickness.

I have learned that I still love my husband in sickness. I have learned that we can still have moments of joy and deep connection even in the hard times. We endured the past five years together and together with him is where I want to be - till death do us part.