Firsts are a lot less important than we think they are. Those first things say something about us, of course, but they don't finish the sentence. Firsts are just the beginning of the story, the introduction to the characters. Firsts are relatively easy, they're beautiful and glamorous and no one fights and everyone looks good.
I wouldn't trade the first day of our life for anything, but it hasn't been that first day that marked who we are.
It was all the days of waking up before the sun, and the nights of coughing for ten hours straight and not being banished to the couch. It was the years of working six days a week at part-time jobs cobbled into full. It was weekend afternoons spent doing dishes, midnights cleaning up puke, kissing goodbye even though we were both irritated, making supper after a twelve-hour workday, getting up too early Sunday mornings to run set-up at church. It was dinners spent chatting about what the future would look like, glasses tipped in conspiracy, competing for our share of the chips, playing and dreaming and setting the tone for the coming months. It was Thanksgivings that took hours longer to be ready than we planned, car fights and make-ups, parties we threw and parties we didn't want to go to, shoving couches and Christmas trees and bookshelves and our hopes and dreams into a three-room apartment. It was watching action movies through my fingers, side-eye watching you suffer through my romcoms, and trying (and failing) to find that one movie we both agreed on. It was arguing about money and cars and chores and holidays and beating out some sort of agreement. It was watching you dance with babies, joke with friends, run a team, help a friend move. It was tearful confessions received with mercy and the days you couldn't stop laughing at me even though I thought you should be furious. It was late-morning weekend breakfasts, coffee dates on Sundays, navigating our way in a new city. It was flying across the country, early morning runs, walking to get coffee on vacation, discovering new restaurants together. It was late nights of studying, early mornings before tests, days that were longer than our physical stamina. It was fancy celebration dinners and midnight diner trips for pie. It was waking up with bedhead and pillow-lines mapped on my face and still getting a smile, your eyes crinkled that way they do. It was hearing Jesus ask "Do you love Me...?" and wrestling through what that looked like. It was the better, the worse, the sickness, the health, the wealth, the poverty. And those things didn't come first.
It was the dying that told me who you truly were. And so much of love is watching someone die, and dying for them, again and again and again even when you truly don't think there is anything else left to give.
So here's to firsts-- their beauty and awkward messiness and grandeur and preciousness. And here's also to making it to the finish line, keeping eyes on the end goal, and pacing each other while we run. I couldn't have known on that first day what a fantastic partner you'd be, but I'm glad Holy Spirit told me to choose you.
