This morning as I reflected on the birth of my Lord, I was struck by a comment my husband made over Christmas Eve dinner last night. Allow me to set the scene.

We had attended Christmas Eve Eve service the previous night and were enjoying a quiet “early bird special” meal at our favorite local Italian restaurant. This was the place where we started dating again during our separation three years ago. This was the place where our love for each other was rekindled during late afternoon lunches on gray wintery weekend days. This was the place where Christ was born into our marriage as truth was finally somehow safe to share. This was the place where the love of God began flowing freely between us. Why here? Why at this time in our union? Only God knows the answers to those questions – and that’s fine with us – because this place was where the spark that was invoked in February 2005 took hold and the fire started to blaze. 

And today, we both know the reason for that – because it was during that separation when both our hearts were made so painfully barren that only the love of God could fill them. 

You have the scene now – a quiet restaurant where love was reborn, on the eve of our Lord’s birth – which just so happened to be twenty years from the anniversary of the night when my husband proposed to me. 

So, I was sitting there looking at him as he squinted in a desperate attempt to see the bar television that was showing a replay of some great golf tournament, while listening to a horrible new rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock” playing throughout the restaurant. In that moment, it hit me that this wasn’t just our favorite restaurant, and it was not just Christmas Eve, it was twenty years since my guy – my one true love on this earth – actually asked me to marry him. I remembered immediately how nervous he was in that moment, holding that sparkly ring out to me, and my heart giggled again, thinking of anyone being that nervous for little old me. 

And then I heard myself saying to him: “Thank you for asking me to marry you.”  

And it was so romantic and heart-filled and amazing for about ten seconds…the ten seconds it took for my husband to shift his squinting eyes from the bar television across the restaurant to look at me and say, “Really? This again? Do we have to do this every year?” 
And I responded in the way I always do when he fails to appease the romantic in me with, “C’mon, how can you not feel romantic about the 20th anniversary of the night you proposed to me?”  And that was when he said it. The comment that I thought of this morning as I reflected on the birth of my Lord: “After all these years, you still don’t know me, do you?”

I smile now as I write these words on paper – thinking how the 25-year-old me would probably stop reading at this point of the story, while judging this pathetic author for settling for some unromantic guy who can’t even think to toast an anniversary with his wife. I think of all the painful unfilled expectations that she has yet to experience and I love her in her naivete that is trapped in the delusions of a worldly version of marriage. 

And then I thank God for blessing me – and my marriage – with the birth of His Son. 

Because here’s the thing: when I heard myself thanking my husband for proposing, I knew exactly how he would respond – and that’s the beauty of Christ’s love being born into our marriage – it does not matter to me that the love of my life on this earth is not romantic or that he feels uncomfortable when I get mushy with him about our love. What does matter to me more than anything else is that the One true love of my eternity has been born in me, again today, and every day; and He has been born into my husband and into our marriage, too. 

The journey to this STABLE-ity was arduous and exhausting at times; but the Light that was waiting for us and that still shines within us in acceptance, support, gratitude, and unconditional love is more powerful than any glass slipper or magical fairy godmother. 

That Light, born again each day in our hearts is the one that, after all these years, this world still does not know. Our gratitude lies within the fact that while we may not understand completely how that light shines in us, and in spite of the chaos of the world in which we live, we are still willing to walk in the wake of it as it parts the chaos with its Peace.