I Choose You: Sacred

Before I launch into the post this morning. I must pause to wish my handsome and wonderful husband a happy birthday! I thought about pausing the whole I CHOOSE YOU series to devote a post to his birthday, but I wanted to wrap this one up this week, so I'll do a short version happy birthday now, and a longer version happy birthday later. Ryan, I love you and am so excited to celebrate you today! You are my joy!

Secondly, it is Tuesday, of course, which means it's PODCAST TUESDAY!!!!!!

Listen here!

And now, to our regularly scheduled programming! 

We've been looking at the phrase I CHOOSE YOU and how Ryan and I choose to apply that to our marriage, and today we are ready for letter S, which in our world means sacred.

That is sacred and not scared. Big difference. ;)

This is a big one for us. Huge! I'm looking forward to telling you what it means to us and why it's so pivotal.

You've heard it said, I'm sure - and maybe you've even said it yourself! - Is nothing sacred anymore? Sadly, it seems most things aren't, but your marriage doesn't have to be among them. Ryan and I believe a big part of fostering a healthy marriage involves choosing each other by choosing to keep your relationship sacred.

Now, when you see those words, the first thing that probably comes to your mind is keeping your relationship sacred by choosing to put a hedge of protection around it that keeps out the temptation of an affair. We do mean that (obviously!) but we also mean something more. We think it's important to keep sacred some of the details of your relationship together. 

If you've been reading here for a while, you know that we had a pretty short pre-marriage relationship. We'd known of each other for most of our lives, and we had been friends for a few years, but our dating season was really short, and so was our engagement! (You can read more of our story here if you don't know it and want to see the details!) 

Let me tell you this! When you pull a stunt like we did, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of opinions about how you should and should not be managing your relationship and decisions. And they're very open with them! 

I take things like that pretty personally, so the shower of unsolicited advice made me sweat. And worse, it made me question myself. Here's the bottom line: we were confident in our decisions. We had sought the Lord in a time of set-apart prayer before we ever began our relationship, and we continued our deep prayer-seeking throughout those early stages. We also sought counsel from friends and family before moving forward. We didn't rush in blindly and without consideration. But whether or not people knew that, they still had opinions they shared freely. (It was even a bit much for Ryan, and he can normally handle that sort of thing pretty well.)

We decided we would just keep a big chunk of our relationship sacred. We weren't trying to be dishonest or secretive from others, but these moments were so precious to us that we just wanted them to be ours alone. I chronicled them in our journals and scrapbooks, but we were protective of those moments in bigger audiences. 

I didn't blog everything. I didn't put everything on Facebook. And since I was working in radio back then, I also kept some of it from the airwaves. Those things belonged to us, and we unapologetically protected them. 

Honestly, I think one of the reasons we were able to so quickly form the deep bond we have was because of this choice we made to keep so much sacred and precious to us!

There's a delicate balance between being transparent about your relationship in ways that encourage others and protecting it as sacred. You know, if you read here often, that we are pretty open about our lives. We want to encourage other couples, and if showing how we live will do that, we're happy to show how we live. But we also want to protect our hearts, so we don't tell every single thing - good or bad. Some things are ours for safekeeping. And that's okay too!

Choose to honor one another, not by having secrets from each other, but by being willing to keep parts of your life in a secret place. This is true if you're married or single. Our social media world seems to demand that we tell all things at all times, and it's just not necessary. Your heart matters, and it's okay to know your sharing boundaries. It's actually imperative that you know your sharing boundaries.

The world is filled with loud opinions. Sometimes the hardest ones come from family and close friends. It's okay to even protect some things from them! (I know, no one wants to hear that. But it's true!) This is your marriage: not the world's marriage. Nor is it your family's marriage or your friends' marriage. Choose your marriage and choose each other by keeping your relationship sacred.

Ryan, thank you for helping me keep our relationship sacred. I love you! Happy birthday again! 

If you've missed some of the posts in this series - or you want to keep reading, you can catch them here:

I Choose You: Introduction
I Choose You: Intentional
I Choose You: Chronicles
I Choose You: Help
I Choose You: Optimism
I Choose You: Openness
I Choose You: Sacred

I Choose You: Exciting
I Choose You: Yoked
I Choose You: Only
I Choose You: Understanding
I Choose You - Works For You