Well, hello, gentle readers.

It’s good to be on your screens again.

It’s been quite a year since I last wrote for the Reformed Journal. I began work on a PhD, stepped away from pastoral ministry, moved to Hamilton, introduced my cats to life with a dog, and, on July 5, got married!

Which means my wedding anniversary is two days after Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell’s, and so two days before I got married at the age of 34, I was reading Steve’s defense of getting married at the age of 23.

Steve writes (and many of you affirmed this in your comments) that being young helped make his and Sophie’s marriage successful because it meant they weren’t bringing a lot into their marriage. They got to form their life together, rather than try to meld two established lives together. Not having the baggage of careers, houses, pets, and different friend groups made things less messy right off the bat.

These days, thirty-four isn’t all that late to be getting married. But it does mean that Justin and I are pretty established people already. We attended different universities, have lived in different provinces and states, have accumulated different friend groups and communities, and feel at home within different denominations. Neither of us is particularly rigid about things – we like to explore new places and churches and ideas, and I think we’re pretty good communicators about it all.

But it’s hard work. Transitions – all transitions, even good ones – bring with them some level of grief. As we step into something new and good and beautiful and fulfilling, we’re leaving behind something that was also good. We’ve been shaped and formed by the people and places and roles and ways of life we’ve inhabited. As we seek to establish new rhythms, and find our sense of community as a couple, and make career decisions based on new priorities, and find a church home that fits us both, I feel joy and excitement, but also some resistance. I want to hold onto the familiar. I want to be the me I know in the contexts I’ve known and in which I’ve been known.

Negatively, we might say that Justin and I are bringing some baggage into our marriage.

But our wedding text is helping me reframe that idea.

We chose Psalm 16 to be our wedding text after talking one morning to an older couple who have served as mentors for Justin. They met and married when they were both serving as missionaries, and Psalm 16 was their wedding passage, particularly verses 5 and 6:

“Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;
you make my lot secure.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.”

Justin and I looked at each other over our coffees and knew at once that this would be our text as well. For in a season full of uncertainty and transition, when we weren’t quite sure what life would look like and where it would take us, we knew that we had found home in each other.

But it wasn’t until I was standing on a platform in the woods, looking out at the people who had gathered for our wedding, that I fully appreciated the second half of that line: “Surely I have a delightful inheritance.”

When I think of an inheritance, I think of a continuation. Jacob and Esau grew up in an environment shaped by their father. The inheritance they fought over meant a continuation of that environment, that way of life, after Isaac’s death. An inheritance is something you can count on, something given to you, something that abides amidst change and transition.

As Justin and I made our vows to each other at the foot of the Niagara Escarpment, marking the transition from one way of being to another, we did so in the presence of family and friends who have walked with us through all the different seasons of our lives. In each season, our identities have been nurtured and shaped by community, so that when we move on, when transition happens, there is something we carry forward that wasn’t there before. We are given an inheritance to take with us.

An inheritance might not be any less messy than baggage (see prior reference to Jacob and Esau). It still requires a lot of conversation about how to blend these two lives together. But framing our past as an inheritance makes me feel more playful about it all. And more grateful. Like what we carry into this marriage is a gift we get to unbox and explore together, rather than a burden we feel we have to protect.

An inheritance points to the God who has been faithful along this winding road, and who will continue to be faithful. As we stumble through conversations about who gets to drive and what meal planning looks like and how we’re going to divide chores and what is the correct way to store vegetables in the fridge. And the more important conversations about community and vocation and faith.

The winding road continues, and I’m eager to see how our inheritance will grow as we journey along this road together.