Marriage Amidst COVID-19

Have you ever watched something come back alive?

Back in February I remembered getting asked nonstop how wedding planning was going. I was really tired of answering that question to be honest, but I felt like we were fine. We had a Trello board(highly recommend for all your project planing needs) with tasks broken down by party and due dates. It definitely was a lot of work, but we were doing it! Really the only thing we didn’t take into account was a global pandemic happening.

It was sort of a slow burn for me. I remember hearing whispers of some kind of outbreak in China late last year and then in February when I caught the flu I saw signs in the urgent care center about getting tested(back when there were tests available when you wanted them). Then we had state-wide orders to work from home if you were able. I still don’t think I realized the magnitude of what was happening at this point or what plans wouldn’t survive in the wake. I remember assuring Amy, “I mean, worst case is some people might not travel all the way to California.” Oh early March Kevin, how naive you were.

I can honestly say it was the worst week of my life. Not only were we told that there just wasn’t a possible way to still do our wedding event, but each of the back up plans also were impossible to pull off too. I feel sort of silly for how much of a emotional toll the cancellation took on me. We were healthy, had jobs we could work from home, and still in love, but just unable to have that big expensive ceremony with flowers and food – first world problems, am I right? I think I was mostly frustrated because I knew these things ultimately didn’t matter. We each received text message after text message about “It’s really your love that is the important part”. Yes. We knew that. It wasn’t really our desire to have a giant party so much as it was us wanting to celebrate with our friends and family. Every single person invited to our wedding(and of course others, but guest list limits) had left their mark on each of lives, turning us into who we were and who we would become together. We wanted that community to know and feel their part in our marriage. That’s what we lost.

Have you ever watched something come back alive? We did. That community that we thought wasn’t going to get to play a part showed up in force. Family dropped everything they were doing to take care of anything they could handle in our place. Dear friends sent us flowers. Our premarital pastors fed us and provided space to process loss. People still bought gifts for us despite being told there would be no ceremony they could come to. We got invited to virtual happy hours to talk and play games to take or minds of everything. We felt their love. We felt your love. It calmed us in the midst of the chaos. It made us smile before the tears had finished drying. It reminded us that you all still are an integral part of our story and that you feel valued. Wedding reception or not.

We’re still getting married tomorrow, as planned. Not at the venue. Not with a room full of guests. But with a ceremony that will celebrate who we were becoming and all the people that got us there.

Still having chicken and waffles though. That was a must-have.

Some Thoughts on Rain

Rain makes me appreciate the sunny days more. I find that when summer finally rolls around with a streak of sunny days in the high 90°s, I enjoy it(at least at the beginning). That warm temperature feeling is welcome because it isn’t going to last. It allows us to have float parties at Greenlake, go hiking more often, and see a long reaching view from a vantage point. Having something you enjoy disappear for a bit can allow you to appreciate other things. Not that I’m glad the rain I love is gone, but it being gone has given me a new space or time I wouldn’t otherwise have.

Rain forces me to slow down. This is true in both a literal and figurative sense. Traveling while in the rain I find myself moving slower, the wet ground can be slippery so extra care needs to be taken. I’m not sure if the idea of going outside is less attractive in the rain or that staying inside snuggling up with a blanket is more so, but I usually always find myself curled up in my reading nook. Rainstorms in Seattle also tend to come with a decent amount of power outages, I guess it’s all the trees falling on power lines. And yea, a power outage can blow when you just want to binge watch Stranger Things, but with the power gone it also gives way to lying in bed way longer then necessary, day dreaming those deep thoughts alone or with a friend, or finally picking up that theology book to read. When I am forced to slow down I am reminded of the things I usually leave behind when I’m too busy hopping from one thing to the next.

Rain cleans and refreshes. Not too long-ago Seattle had a really bad smoke problem. All this smoke from forest fires was being blown into our air space and it got so bad you could honestly stare at the sun and not hurt your eyes. It hurt to breathe and waking up in the morning your throat felt dry. After a week or two of this terrible air quality, the smoke was cleansed from our sky by a little bit of rain. That was all it took to become clear again! I don’t think I had been that happy for rain to arrive in a long time. It’s honestly an incredible gift whenever it falls from the heavens and rinses the world around us. The air smells different, plants become greener, and everything feels fresh.

Living in Seattle now for close to five years(whoa!) rain has become a more common part of my life. Seattle doesn’t get the most rain in the country but it is up there for most rainy days. Growing up in Southern California I wasn’t a stranger to rain. El Niño* brought plenty of to my elementary school, typically getting recess cancelled because the playground would flood. But when the rain stopped I knew it would be many months before it returned. I always looked forward to those spring days when the clouds would open up, the trees and bushes would ripple underneath the watery cascade, and the soft taps on the roof and windows would lull me to sleep.

*I just found out El Niño actually makes the Northwest hotter and drier while the Southwest gets all that rain, weather is neat!

Airplane Movie Reviews

I took a vacation for two weeks in New Zealand which involved flying over the Pacific Ocean-there and back again.  I usually enjoy plane rides long or short since I can finish off a book, sleep most of the way, or pass the time with free movies.  Virgin Airlines usually has a great choice of movies to watch for free.  My flight over I didn’t watch that many since I wanted to get myself on the proper sleep schedule.  Coming back I had the unfortunate middle seat along with people seated directly behind and in front of me who made it their mission to keep me from sleeping at all, so all I did was watch film after film.  Anyway, here is what I watched and what I thought about them.

  • Frozen – 4/5
    • Yes, I know I’m late to this party. I thought Frozen was a great Disney movie. Fun plot, funny characters, good sing-a-long songs, and a happy ending. Tangled was better.
  • Monsters University – 3.5/5
    • I’ll be honest, I only watched this for Nathan Fillion, and he was awesome! A nifty prequel with your typical underdog plot.
  • Despicable Me – 5/5
    • Somehow, I missed this when it came out and never got around to watching it. Well, I’m really glad I caught it on the flight back because I was blown away. The animation was brilliant, the acting was top notch, and I was not expecting to have my emotions pulled out at 30,000 miles in the air!  After it was over, I just sat there feeling so happy for Gru.
  • Fifth Estate – 4/5
    • A cyber thriller telling the debated story of Wikileaks and its creator Julian Assange, comes with a healthy dose of Benedict Cumberbatch. If you like journalistic, uncover the truth, race against authority thrillers then you’ll probably enjoy this. The film is probably more of a 3/5, it lagged for me at times. But I’ve always found the whole Wikileaks story very interesting and could follow along with my own knowledge, so that might have made it more enjoyable for me.
  • Now You See Me – 3.5/5
    • A band of magicians start to rob banks during their live performances and the FBI is after them. Super fun to see the magic get executed, FBI outsmarted, and watch the plot twist and turn further.
  • Act of Valor – ?/5
    • I more or less collapsed in my seat from exhaustion halfway through this one, finally thwarting the sleep barons surrounding me. I am assuming this is probably a 2/5 at best if I had to predict what the score would be. It felt like they came up with the idea, “Hey let’s use real a real Navy SEAL team as the action stars” and didn’t take it much further.

Offering Too Much Advice

One of the things I tend to do is give advice when others share a problem or concern. Sometimes I give advice when people don’t even ask for it, I just start listing out possible solutions. Sometimes I’ll talk too much trying to explain my advice when they don’t particularly care or they already understand it and I end up annoying them. ‘Mainsplaining’ is the term used when men feel the freedom to do this to others without considering their expertise.

Even if you feel it may be a way of expressing you care, you still need to be mindful of how others take it.

Ever Watched Something Come Back To Life?

I was remembering the Blue Like Jazz movie resurrection story the other day, I’m still blown away that we pulled it all off.

  • Donald Miller writes a well-received book called Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.  It gets pretty popular among 20/30-somethings for how personable Miller’s writing style is and his honest takes on Christianity.
  • Steve Taylor approaches Miller to make a movie out of Blue Like Jazz. They find investors for it to happen.
  • The day before pre-production, an investor backs out. Miller announces on his blog that the movie is seemingly dead for now.
  • A band of fans got together and decided that this wasn’t going to stop this movie from happening.  We’d heard about it, read about it, and now we were going to save it. The Blue Like Jazz Kickstarter was born.
  • Ten days later the Kickstarter campaign passes its $125k minimum to fund the movie. We did it.  Blue Like Jazz was to be the first major release American movie to be crowd sourced, and I, along with quite a few others, was now an “Executive Producer”. The campaign continued to raise money the next 20 days which helped afford better production. Taylor and Miller were stunned at how quickly this happened and got back to work on it immediately.
  • The movie was finally released in April 2012, and I rather enjoyed it.

It was an amazing experience watching something we cared about come back to life after it had been declared dead.  I couple things I learned from this adventure:

  1. If you care about something enough, try to make it happen! A few of us got over 3,000 people to join in and raise $125k.
  2. Institutions, precepts, and ‘The Man’ don’t have to be accepted blindly. If people want to see something change, they should, and can, step up and change it themselves. There’s a reason labor unions are effective at what they do.
  3. I find honest discussions about Christianity get taken much more seriously in our culture than bible thumping or Christian fantasy movies like Fireproof.

Love is for Others

A while ago someone married to a paraplegic for 16 years was doing an AskMeAnything on reddit and got asked the question “How’s the sex life?” No doubt the person who asked was trying to be humorous, but the man gave an answer anyway.

Somehow I knew this was going to be the first question…I’m not gonna lie. Sex is one of the big issues. I wish I was a better man, and could simply ignore that side of myself, but I’m not. I get as frustrated as anyone else, and working through that is difficult.

What followed was one of the best interactions I have seen concerning the difference of what real love is and what many people think of it is, someone else followed up and pressed the issue further;

Have you ever considered or had a discussion with your wife about making the physical aspect of your relationship open? You both have needs, and I respect your patience and efforts to be a good husband. However, I feel that on a level of need you may benefit from having an agreement with your wife about a sexually open relationship while maintaining an otherwise monogamous one.

This suggestion hurts my soul every time I read it. I do not know if this person genuinely believed this idea was a good one or he was just wondering out loud what the man thought about it. What it really says, is “love should be about you getting everything you want and if you are missing anything then you should go get it elsewhere.” Sure, redefine the way a relationship works to fulfill your needs. You deserve it. You’re entitled to it.

The married man answered;

I’ve had others ask this question before, but lets be serious here.

My wife already deals with feelings of inadequacy because of the things she can’t provide for me physically. She knows I love her anyway, but she can’t help feeling like she’s somehow less than a “real” wife.

Were I to go elsewhere for sex, romping around with some able-bodied lady, even if it was done with her knowledge and nominal permission, any sense of security that she has in me, in us, would be gone. That kind of damage is irreparable.

An “open relationship” would signify only that my physical needs are more important than her emotional ones. And that just isn’t true.

Beautiful.

Yes I know, sex is not love. I think that love is greater than sex, but they are connected in ways and I think that is another way of looking at what is being misrepresented here. When this man opens himself to questions about his marriage and someone asks him about sex, he doesn’t try to disconnect the two like the second questioner does because the married man knows they are intertwined. He knows asking him “How’s the sex life?” is in part asking him “How’s the marriage life?”. I doubt his answer would probably be any different if the question was changed. The man understands that to go outside of his marriage for sex, or for anything, would render his marriage pointless. Whatever benefits he would receive from outside his marriage are worth nothing to him if his marriage or wife suffers.

I believe that our biggest need is love, but love is a funny thing because in order to do it correctly one must put another’s needs before their own. That is so hard to do sometimes. Being a selfish 22-year-old, my innate desire is not to put another’s wants or needs before my own. My brain says that the most efficient way to enjoy the benefits of life is to have all my needs met without doing any work. But because I love her, I make any of her needs more important than all of mine.  Well, I try to.  I fail a lot, but that is another story.  The point is we cannot fulfill our own need for love, we must love something beyond ourselves if we want it to be real.

One last person made a snide comment;

So it’s essentially a one-way deal, where she gets here psychological needs met, and you don’t. Got it. But then, I guess you made that decision when you got married. Oh well.

The man responded;

Not really, no. It is called love. It is letting the needs of someone else supersced your own. I’m rather sorry you feel the way you do. You’re missing out in the long run.