scarred lion’s skin

Tomorrow is Robyn and I’s ten year wedding anniversary. But I won’t post tomorrow, because I’m shutting my phone off for the week to vacation with her.

Always, I am fiercely aware of the families who are, today, in the same place we were when Ezra’s life was a question mark for us. And so, as always (seriously, thank you all for all your support), I’ll mention a way you can help to change our story for another family – I’m $800 short of my $2,500 goal for my first fundraiser under Because of Ezra’s new name (Beat Nb). I’m running 7 miles in Boston with 9,000 other people at Falmouth Road Race.
The day I met Robyn, she walked into a Smart Wireless store in the Everett Mall with her mom, wearing a rainbow belt and short hair. Robyn was beautiful, and she was odd, in a way I found maddeningly appealing. I was intrigued.
For our first date, we went to The Old Spaghetti Factory, and she was impressed I tipped well. Robyn had lost her dad at 9 to cancer, and her mom, Vivian, had been a waitress most of her life. Now, her mom is my mother in law, and I love her. She keeps it real, although it’s hard for me to see she’s been getting heavily involved in listening to country music lately.

Neither of us asked the other out – Robyn handed me her phone when I came to see her the first time after I met her, and on it was her friend Leah who asked me to come on a double date with them. Now, after a decade in different cities, Leah lives in St Pete with her husband Justin and their new baby, Nova.

Robyn and I had only known each other a matter of months when I asked her to move to Tampa with me, as I’d already been planning to when I met her, but had called my folks and said “hold on, I met a girl.” She came with me, and moved into an apartment down the street, and I moved back in with my folks for the 4th time, at 23 years old. She happily cried when we were on a boat one day in St Pete and I asked her to be my wife.

At our wedding in Marysville shortly after, I played her a song I’d written for her (we’d met some friends in Tampa, but most of our people were still Seattle folk). We got an apartment in Tampa; Ezra’s first home. I was leading worship at Grace Family Church Van Dyke at the time, and through Ezra’s entire cancer diagnosis, treatment, and death, our church family was close and kind to us.

We were given three sons, two died in 2010. A fourth came into our home but has since left, although he remains our son.

Over the years, we’ve driven across the country, shared meals across the world, met many people we love, and I strongly believe we’ve been a part of saving many children’s lives. There’s a thread that ties tightly to every story I’ve felt these past ten years, and that thread is Robyn.

Love is a choice, we’re told. I had no idea what that meant the first time I said the words to her, at the base of the Snoqualmie Waterfalls. I knew I cared for her, and I knew she was a beauty, and I knew this was fun. But I had no idea what it feels like to experience tragedy. I had no idea the loss she would face, holding me tight, the two days I can remember, burned in my mind in perfect clarity as long as I live, as we held our sons and knew they were here no longer. Or the way it feels to break apart, in rushing landslides of loss and in glacial, terrible hurt and question while you try to make since of the thing that has happened. Luckily, I suppose, boredom and monotony have never been our crosses to bear.

There is no “fair,” as we know it, and our life hasn’t been “fair.” What has been ripped from my wife is not right, and I have cried nearly as many tears as she has, seeing the way it has broken her.

She is mine. I choose to love her, and she me, and it is often easy, and often not. I am selfish and foolish. I am broken. She encourages me when I am doubtful or weary. Sometimes, we have both been unable to hold each other up, and so we only hold on to each other, knowing there is strength found in weakness, knowing God holds us when we can’t hold each other. In the worst times in our minds, at least hoping that’s the case.

Outside right now, there’s a Florida summer storm battering down on our home. But inside, I can hear Robyn’s voice echoing as she and Leah laugh. And I feel the pressure on my eyes and blurry edges of vision as tears don’t quite appear, hoping our hearts are the inside of this home and our scarred lion’s skin is the exterior. We have been battered, and we have stood, bowed like a tree to the hurricane in more sense than one.

I look at or think of Robyn and smile. I am proud of the woman she is. I am honored to know she’s proud of the man I am. I know her weaknesses, and she knows mine. We have seen our brokenness and chosen to love deeper in those places, pushing bitterness from our minds, chasing away that jaded feeling that gnaws at us the more we learn of the world. Our son is stubborn and joyful, sharing my lighthearted approach to many things, and her fierce tenacity. Robyn feels guilty when she thinks of herself first (although I encourage her, and help, to create space where that’s precisely what she does).

She is rare, and beautiful, and a bit scary, and I am drawn to her now more than I ever have been. 10 years is a beginning. I love you Robyn Matthews – let’s do some more.