Last ... {Five Minute Friday} ~ The Grace Between

Last … {Five Minute Friday}

I don’t want to think about the “last time”  for anything.

But I have to – it’s a requirement for this life we live.

The closer good-bye comes, the larger “last” looms. 

It’s why I always save the last {latest} voicemail from the Husband. It’s why I always say I love you on the phone … the last words he’ll hear from me, just in case. Each moment before the leaving swollen with significance when viewed through the lens of “last.”

Last grasps and a long hard last kiss goodbye and a walk away and it’s coming and I’m not ready. 

No, I don’t want to talk about that tonight. Instead, I’ll tell you about the last first kiss … on a different hot July night nine years ago, and my stomach all twisted in knots, my heart leaping out of my chest. Interminable small talk, while he gathered his courage to tell me the truth. The best first kiss I ever had, too, in a swampy Florida park, and the campfire trailing out with the waiting and my best friend hiding in the tent. She was the kind of friend who would go to bed at seven pm because she knew how much he wanted to kiss me. 

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{This was just hours before.}

And when you ask him when he knew he wanted to marry me, he’ll tell you it was on that hot July night, when our lips touched and his knees knocked.

They knocked again five months later, when he asked me to marry him in the Spokane airport, me all un-showered and wearing two days of standby travel. Speechless.

And those three thousand and ten days-ish later, my heart is leaping still when I see him, my handsome soldier Husband who loves me, and our three babes, just a little bit less than he loves Jesus.

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And in the upcoming days and weeks, last will be an ugly, hard word that conjures up the worst of all endings, but tonight, just for tonight, it is a treasured snapshot of our beginning,

~M.

{Editor’s note: If you are new to the blog, my Husband is an active duty Army pilot preparing for his fourth deployment … it’s heavy on my heart at the moment. Our deployments have been hard. And sanctifying, but mostly just really hard.}

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