Reviewing and Renewing Our Vows

After going through all of this life and death drama over the last couple months, I suddenly started to understand why people will renew their vows. Why they want to get married all over again.  I felt like after everything, after all of this new perspective, I wanted to get married again because I felt more fully informed on why being married is so important and even with all of this new information....I would do it all over again.

One night in the hospital, in the middle of December after Aaron's second surgery, I thought,"When you get married, you don't think of moments like this.  You never think that someday you will be standing next to them in a hospital room trying to put things back together."

I remember while making the decision to get married thinking,"Okay, I know that love and marriage is more than just making out and going on dates. It's washing dishes and paying bills and deciding together where to live and how to raise kids."

But I didn't ever think about not being able to have kids. Or having miscarriages and grieving differently. Or what if one of us died and left the other one behind with kids. I didn't think about major medical problems. Helping each other perform basic functions that we're not capable of doing any more. I didn't think it would be watching a spouse go through extreme physical agony while I just held his hand.

Knowing what I know now about marriage, I wanted to do it all over again. After all life has thrown at us the past nearly 6 years, I wanted to get married to Aaron. I wanted to renew our vows.

Not in a big huge showy kind of way. I didn't want guests or anything. I just wanted to kneel at an alter like I did on our wedding day, looking into the eyes of the man I'll love forever and say,"Yes" again but this time really meaning it while knowing what I know now.

So a couple days after Easter, Aaron and I went to the Las Vegas Nevada temple and did sealings. I got to wear the dress that I got married in and kneel at the alter and hear the same binding words and promises that I heard on our wedding day and stare into the eyes of the man of my dreams. We did it in proxy of another couple (ask me if you want to know more about that), but it was like renewing those same vows for our marriage. A fresh reminder of all we promise and are promised in return.

I loved staring into the eyes of a wiser and more mature (albeit much thinner) Aaron. I loved thinking of all our children we have promised to be ours forever. And I loved being so in love with this man who I know inside and out (now more literally than I'd ever thought) and knowing he was mine no matter what life might throw at us.

Most of all, I loved how strong we've grown. How tried and true our commitment to each other has been proven so far.

"For Time and All Eternity"