So, ya, I know this is probably not the article you were expecting when I said I was going to be talking about marriage, but this is the one I’m going to write because well, I’m real like that. You’re welcome.

When I was single, I was talking to one of my friends who had recently gotten married and she told me that sometimes she just wanted to go home. Well, I laughed a little at the time, but I obviously thought she was crazy, or maybe she had problems with her husband or something. I just thought it was so sad that she had what so many other girls were looking and longing for, and she wasn’t as happy as she had ever been in her entire life.

……and then I got married.

Don’t get me wrong. There has not been one day or night that I have regretted marrying my husband. He is THE BEST guy I have ever met, and treats me so much better than most of the time I deserve. I love him with all my heart, and wouldn’t trade our life for the world, but if I’m honest, there have been times when I have woken up, or gone to bed, and thought to myself, “this marriage thing is really great and all, but can I go home now?”

See, being married means you’re like basically an adult. You have to pay all your bills, and clean your house, and cook dinner, and go to work, and your husband has to do the same. It’s building a home and a life and that life is big and comes with many responsibilities; and being that I was a newlywed, it was all very new for me.

Home was established. Home was comforting. Home I was taken care of. Home I didn’t have to pay the electric bill or go grocery shopping. Our life together was just getting started, I was learning and my new husband was learning how to take care of our responsibilities and how to take care of each other. We were excited to do it! But our life and our home was not firmly rooted yet as the homes we came from. Our home together was just a baby seedling needing lots of time and care and attention- all of which we were only just learning how to give.

I have learned a lot in my first year and a half of marriage, if only just that I still have a lot to learn, and that God gives us the grace we need to learn and grow in every new chapter of life. This season has required me to be a stronger, more dependent, more independent, more understanding, more forgiving, more apologetic, more open and honest, more of me than I have ever been, but I am learning. We both are, and as we learn and as we grow, we get better at being home for one another, and this life is getting more wonderful every day.

Soon, my hallways will be filled with the sounds of our little girl, and I will have to grow again and learn again, and I can’t wait. I can’t wait for us to be a family, and for us to have put a whole new level of joy on the home we are building together, and for this house and this man and my family to feel that much more like home- my home, our home, the home we have made together with our love, sweat, and tears.

If you are getting married soon, or have been married recently, take encouragement from this post that maybe you aren’t alone in feeling a tad overwhelmed, maybe a little homesick at times, and vastly unprepared for what is unfolding before you. God will grow you into the person you need to be, God will grow your husband into the person he needs to be, and you will find your home to be as wonderful as the two of you make it together.

If you’re still single, and marriage is not in the immediate plan, tuck this one away in your heart for future reference, and expect marriage to be not only wonderful, but also a little difficult at first, as I imagine it is for everyone.

And if you have been married for a while, maybe look back and laugh, and thank God for how far you have come, and, while you’re talking to Him, say a prayer that in all of our homes, new and old, we will live in ways that bring glory to our God. 🙂