My Story-Part 5

Not Happily Ever After, but Better

It could be easy to think that after marrying Ben everything would be like a fairy tale. But that’s not really what happened for us—in fact it wasn’t even a fairy tale honeymoon. Or much of a honeymoon at all!

I like to make sure Ben knows we never got a real honeymoon. Even if we could redo it, later in marriage, it’s just called vacation. Here’s what happened…

On the plane from Minnesota to Texas, Ben asked me for the vomit bag. Before I knew what he wanted, I was covered.  We changed out of our puke covered clothes on our layover in Texas, but at the gate for our flight to Mexico, Ben got sick again, and threw up three more times. 

I was freaking out wondering what was going on with my new husband, should we be going to Mexico, what are we thinking? But Ben felt ready to go, so we boarded the plane. Sitting on the plane to Mexico, I looked over at ben and he was gray, about to pass out. I paged the flight attendant. Asked her if we could have a cold wash cloth, he wasn’t feeling good, he kind of felt like he was going to pass out. Flight attendant by day, nurse by night, she asked, “does he fly a lot, maybe he is just nervous?” My response, “Well, he is a pilot.” 

Instantly, a doctor and physician’s assistant sitting around us came to our aid. The flight attendant, knowing something wasn’t right, set in motion a gate return and had an ambulance called. At the emergency room, Ben was diagnosed with a stomach bug, and dehydration. 

We were not going to Mexico. We spent the first night of our honeymoon far from Mexico in a hotel room, that cost less than the room service we ordered.  We flew home the next day, but not together. I flew home and Ben had to use his original ticket back to Minnesota, as he was scheduled to go back to work right after our week in Mexico. Do you know anyone else who got to have dinner with JUST their in-laws on their honeymoon? Not my husband, just his parents. It was sweet and it is something we can laugh at now, but at the time, I was so angry. 

So our honeymoon was far from a fairy tale. All I can remember is wondering, why? Why, Lord, why?

Why did I not get to go on a honeymoon? After the stress of planning a wedding at a long distance and the stress of graduating and finding a real job, that was all I was looking forward to. I was so disappointed, I was so discouraged, I was so angry! I still don’t know why things happened the way they did. 

What I do know, is that God did not want us to go to Mexico, and he made sure we didn’t make it. 

But the marriage is more important than the wedding and honeymoon, right? That was no fairy tale right away either. As good as our relationship started by going to church and me coming to Christ, our marriage started differently.

Ben and I were surviving, getting along, doing things on our own and certainly not relying on God. Six months into marriage Ben lost his medical certificate—major thing a pilot needs to fly. When a pilot loses his medical certificate, he stops being able to work. Wow! Did we ever find ourselves in trial!

We were newly married, trying to figure out how to live with each other, and supporting ourselves. We were no longer being taken care of by our parents and we also no longer had two paychecks.  And my job didn’t even cover my student loan debt, let along our daily bills. 

How would this work? How could we survive? What should we do?

Notice the questions floating through our minds: They were asking how we would do it, not how He would do it. This was the first time I realized we weren’t relying on God in our marriage. We weren’t doing it right. This is the first time I remember turing to God—really turing to God. 

We made a lot of plans. We made plans for ourselves by ourselves. The plans weren’t made by God, but by just us. Every plan we made fell apart. I no longer felt married—I felt like I shared a bed with a male roommate. We were not talking to each other well. We were not making plans together. We were talking to everyone but the two people we needed to be to talk to—each other and God. I screamed out to God so confused and so lost.

One bright spot in Ben being laid off from work, was he was home on weekends, which meant we could attend church together. We were able to try out a different church we had been interested in. It happened to be Adoption Sunday and the Lord spoke to us both, he told us both we belonged at that church, that He wanted us there. We looked at each other in the car and just both knew that we had both felt the same thing. 

God was working in us. We started relying on God more than ourselves. Ben ever got his medical back and was able to fly again. God was paving paths for us.