garethhenry.za.net

Katherine, my beautiful wife

I love my wife so dearly. There is so much about her that captivates me. The 20 January marked our 5th wedding anniversary. I like to think of it as 1826 days of awesomeness. I list the actual number of days for 2 reasons.

1. It’s one of those quirky things that I do
2. More importantly, a strong marriage over time is dependent on the things we do on a daily basis.

When preparing for our wedding we decided to write our own vows to each other. While doing so I had a picture in my mind of how I wanted our relationship to look, not just on our honeymoon, but after 50 or God-willing even 90 years of doing life together. Mark Driscoll puts it nicely when he says that “Getting married is easy. 50 years of joy is hard.” A very true statement.

My marriage is something I take really serious and I like to think that the vows I made to Katherine on the 20 January 2007 reflect it. Because of this, I revisit my vows every few months to rate myself. Here they are:

“These are my vows to you Katherine, the only girl that has ever captivated me. I vow:

"To love you, love you and love you some more."

To love and cherish you, to respect and adore you. To hold you by my side and not beneath or behind me. To lavish everything on you that I can, and then some more. To always try and understand you. To know you, your heart, your passions and your and dreams. To never withhold my thoughts and dreams. To allow my heart to break, for the same things that break your heart. To have hands and arms that are a safe place and refuge. To have the best hugs, and a heart that beats “You are mine”. To build a life that has eternal value. To show you understanding, wisdom, justice and grace. To cultivate your gifts, calling and view of life. To not only share but give you and our future family the biggest portion of myself. To build you up. To speak truth in love. To present you to God in intercession, by myself and with you. To always challenge our thoughts and paradigms as I find treasure in the word of God. To worship together. To pray together. To make our home a place of peace and joy. To protect you. To fight for you. To pursue you. To boast about you. To be a great lover. To be a great father. And an even better friend. To be tender and gentle, caring and loving, full of humility, strength and compassion. Playful and passionate, bold and patient, to stare into your eyes always captivated. To make you feel like a princess. To make you tea, to rub your feet, to dance with you and spin you around. To hold your hand, to make you laugh, to Hold you tight, and kiss you goodnight. To love you, love you and love you some more.”

The reason I revisit them every few months is because in the mundane of life it is easy to stop putting in effort. It is easy to stop telling your wife that you love her. In the context of bills, insurance contracts, administration, laundry, hours in the traffic and parenting little children who are completely dependent on you it is inconvenient to allow yourself to be captivated by the wonderfully mysterious heart and mind of your wife.

Revisiting my vows is a vital barometer to me because I listed so many specific things in it. In the everyday mundane it is easy to forget to do something simple like taking the time  to just stare into Katherine’s eyes and be captivated. When so much has been happening in my own career over the last few years it is easy to not talk about Katherine’s dreams and desires. With little kids eating, pooping, crawling and jumping around all day it can become easy to let the most important aspect of parenting slide; that being your marriage. The primary way our kids are going to learn about how to treat their future spouses one day will be in how they see Katherine and I relate to each other.

Are we explosive when it comes to disagreements? Is one of us a push over? Are we selfish with our time, or do we pour into each other. Jude (age 25 months) and Benjamin (9.5 months) are very perceptive. They don’t miss a thing. Is Katherine happier when I arrive home? Am I overwhelmed with joy and passion at that first glimpse of my wonderful wife when I arrive home?

So how has our first 5 years been?

In a few short words… Wonderful, challenging, adventurous, painful, encouraging, life changing.

I love my wife. I love her more each year. She is my standard of beauty and every other woman I know falls woefully short. I’m continually challenged by the depth of her love for people, despite some of the unbelievable rejection she has faced. Whenever I think I’ve sorted out any prejudices in my own heart, I only need to watch my wife interact with the next down-and-out individual thrown in her path to realise that I’m still travelling a long journey of embracing people just as they are. I never tire of our stimulating conversations as I get to bounce ideas off her. Ok… so maybe I often get annoyed with her when she just won’t budge on a differing opinion… but I love that as well. Katherine will never just nod at something I say. She’ll engage me back on any topic, often revealing some gaping flaws in my thinking.

Then there is her boldness and bravery. You’ll often hear me say that I didn’t marry a nice girl. I married a world changer. Katherine is loving and compassionate, but she is not nice. There is far too much that I want to accomplish in my life; and so I knew I could never marry a “nice” girl. My wife is a lioness, and she thrives when I let out the lion in me. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying people who marry “nice” girls have somehow settled for less. I just know my own nature and personality. If I had settled down with a “nice” girl then that would have been the last significant thing I ever did. I would just have “settled down” and just gone with the flow of life. No, I wanted a never ending adventure with someone with whom “settling down” would never be an option and I’ve most certainly not been disappointed. Everything about the way we do life screams out “we will not go with the grain.” We will not bow down to popular culture. We will not copy paste the previous generation with a few modernised twists. Everything we do, gets looked at from a fresh perspective and starts with the question “why?”.

Then of course is Katherine’s ability to make tough decisions and stick with them despite rejection and condemnation from the world. Katherine finished high school with bursary options to do everything from metallurgy to professional singing. She is an accomplished artist, and reads music. She once did three years of law-school all in one year (while been married) and yet she has chosen not to bow to the pressure of pursueing a career. Am I a rich sugar daddy? No. Katherine’s decision to stay at home with the kids has cost her immensely and has left us with no budget at all for things like makeup and new clothes. Her decision is not a popular one and is one that get’s ridiculed by popular media. Katherine however goes from strength to strength and excels.

Coming back to my wedding vows. 5 years ago I made a covenant,  a promise to lay down my life to make Katherine’s better. I’ve received great joy and a lot of growth in the process but the fact is that 5 years is just the beginning. Marriage is not a sprint, it is a marathon, and one that we intend on finishing strong. So I resolve again just as I do every few months to be the man behind the heart of what was vowed on that wonderful day 5 years ago.

Kiss me

The skies were dark and it was raining. There was an eerie feeling as our hero peeked outside. It would not be nice, but someone had to do it. Queue the music. Our hero leaps up from the couch, slips his feet into a pair of crocs, leaps with the nimbleness of an elephant from the veranda into the drive-way. With snail like reflexes he fumbles for his keys… fumbles some more… fumbles some more… … … Our hero returns into the house, locates the correct set of keys, stubs his toe, heads back out, fumbles a bit more and finally reverses down the drive way.

The night was eerie

The mission was clear. Katherine needed her cup of tea, but we were out of milk. I had to think quick. None of my standard peddlers of milk were available as it was after EIGHT P.M. It was a desperate situation. At this late hour I’d have to hook up with Eoss  (Engen One Stop Shop).

Open 24 Hours

I dimmed my lights as pulled up to Eoss’ spot. I was ready for the exchange. I glanced around to check that I was safe, took a deep breath, opened the car door and steped out into the rain. Eoss had just what I needed. I looked the merchandise over. Yup. This was a geniune 2 litre bottle of clover milk and all that Eoss wanted was R_5.99…. I squinted at the label. After all 5.99 couldn’t possibly be correct.

A closer look revealed the truth. Eoss would not part with anything less than R25.99.

R25.99!!!

WHAT!!!!

R25.99!!! For two litres of milk.

Crying over unspilt milk

I went back home… empty handed.

Now I realise that many of you are buying 2 litres of clover milk from Checkers/Spar/PnP for about R18.00 – R20.00… the extra R6.00 – R8.00 may seem reasonable for the after hours convenience. My problem however is that we get our milk at R8.00 for just over 2 litres.

This got me thinking about degrees of convenience and what we’re actually paying for at supermarkets. The cost of milk per litre:

• R3.99 – For the convenience of not having to own, feed, look after and milk your own cow, and then having to treat and bottle the milk. Provided you travel to a dairy outlet and provide your own bottle that you’ve had to wash out and sterilise. As a bonus they always overfill the bottle. In effect I pay for 1 litre and get +- another 100ml free
• R5.00 – As above, except they provide the bottle.
• +-R7.00 – As above, except a local dairy brand at your nearest supermarket.
• R8.00-10.00 – As above, except it’s the clover brand.
• R13.00 – Clover… at a 24 hour convenience store.

Am I saying that milk peddled by EOSS is overpriced. No. Not at all. The overheads of keeping staff around the clock 24 hours so that people who are lazy or disorganised can get something they desperately need means that R13.00 per litre is actually really reasonable. In that moment however I decided that the additional cost of the milk for a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal the next morning was not worth the extra R18.00 that the 2 litres of milk would cost me.

Now what have we learned today boys and girls? Supermarkets and 24 hour stores don’t sell goods; they sell convenience.

This has been a great year of improving my self-discipline. I just really really wish I could find the time to write more.

I want to start writing some childrens stories. There is a wonderful world that exists in my head and I’d like to share the joy it has brought to Katherine and I. Perhaps for 2011 I should resolve to watch almost no series and instead write.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Couldn’t sleep. So I released version 1 of my about page. Enjoy

Maybe I should add a photo of myself? Done

Ok, so I got a few articles that I’m drafting. Not yet sure whether my blog will end up following a specific theme or topic or whether it will just contain random musings and thoughts.

Before I start posting regular content I guess I will spend many hours sculpting my wordpress installation into something I like. Perhaps exploring the many plugins available? Twitter feed? Photo slide shows? Not sure what wordpress has to offer yet. Maybe a good starting point would be creating a nice about page.

I’m also curious about blogging via my phone. My current phone is an Android phone and I’ve installed a wordpress application on it. I wonder whether it integrates with things like the phones camera etc. Could make for some interesting (or boring) on-the-spot journalism.

I wonder what makes a good “about” page for a blog. Do I provide a verbose history of my life? Or keep it down to one witty paragraph? Do I go for a bullet point biographical list? Or spend hours and hours trying to craft something eloquent that flows off the tongue? I suppose for it to really be an about page it should reflect who I am.  Spend enough time with me and you’ll know that I love sharing who I was, am and hope to be. So I guess for me an about page would have to reflect the present, allude to a past and empart my hope of the future.

I guess the answer to the title of this entry is… Who am I? I have so much to say. That in itself, is quite a story.

So I finally decided that I actually don’t have enough time to build my own website/blog platform. Instead here is a fresh new wordpress blog

Reasons why I don’t have the time:

• Shortly after embarking on my project, we discovered we were expecting our first child.
• Shortly after that I made a radical career move (which has required time to learn/study)
• My new career comes with an additional 1 – 3 hours of traffic everyday
• When I do have time, my son is more important.

I’m not entirely sure what I wish to blog here. This is primarily to serve as a personal history of thoughts that I’ve captured (comments are welcome though). Why not just do it on paper? That’s simply because I don’t like paper. Well… that’s not true. I actually don’t like pens and pencils. I find them to have the same ergonomics as chair constructed entirely from drawing pins and honey. And what’s up with that annoying sensation of lead scraping against paper (ok, that’s probably a Gareth only quirk).

Happy Spring Day fellow Southern Hemispherers.