Jericho.

My husband and I have been on a hard journey. We have spent the last 12 years together- loving each other deeply, but wondering why each passing year brought more distance and space between our hearts. Or perhaps, as we are now realizing, the space had always been there but we have been slowly growing into the knowledge of the disconnect.

One of my favorite things about God is how He's so thoroughly surprising. It seems that every time I think I have Him figured out, or I think I know how things are going to go, He likes to flip me on my head.

I thought my journey towards knowing true intimacy with my husband was going to take the standard (may I say BORING?) path of discovering and discussing each issue that we could muster up until we finally came to a place of forgiveness and... tolerance?

THAT was my idea of 'a good place to end up' after all of this. A place where it wouldn't be quite so hard to show and receive love from my husband... A place where all my walls would be covered up somehow so that, in time, Chris would maybe just forget that they were there.

I could become like a master magician... hiding the Statue of Liberty by sheer illusion and trickery! Voila!

But God has been dreaming bigger dreams over me.

He wants to straight up JERICHO these walls I've built around my heart. He wants them to crumble into dust so fine that they blow away in a breeze. It's a painful thing to submit to... having all your barriers and 'security' taken away... but I'm trying to keep saying YES to Him because I know these old walls are protecting me from nothing but my own life. And healing love.

God has plans for my marriage to FLOURISH. He wants to see us merge and fall into one another and become strong. He wants to see us pool our hearts together and pour them out on the people He brings us into contact with. He wants to see us laugh and smile and play together and become aware of the power that He's given us as a team. He wants us to be fully known by each other... where there's no shame or fear or holding back, just as He knows and loves us.

One of the surprising ways that He has been slowly building this picture of what our marriage could be like is through giving us some opportunities recently to play music together. He has taken something that we both individually love and He has brought us together in it... showing us the joy and power that comes when we unite our voices and instruments for one purpose. We haven't really played music together like that for seven or eight years. There has been something so intimate about it. And the timing of it- the gentleness and sweetness of it, the FUN of it- they are unmistakeably the handiwork of God.

It has given us hope! It has reminded us that God KNOWS what we love and fights for those things. It has reminded me that God is not boring! He is the most exciting and creative thing in the universe... like Macgyver! Times infinity billion! He's like, "Hand me that broken girl and that humble boy, stat!" And he takes two seemingly damaged-beyond-repair things and makes something beautiful and surprising and confounding out of them.

He is so good!