Enough sermonizing about me and my lifelong identity crisis. Because there is no me alone any longer, for you my Love are forever part of me now. And just so my defunct hormone cascades are not just mine, but yours, ours. My feelings of terror, humiliation, and powerlessness are no longer mine, but ours.

And this drives home that fact that at the heart of life lie joy and sorrow. I have never been more glad to have my deepest fears and fragilities shared and born by the one who has chosen and vowed herself to me. And I have never been more sorry and sad to have foisted my burdens upon the one whom I only ever wanted to lift up, to carry, and hold above the fray of this violent world of crushing and grinding. It was that old self-idea I had all along that fed this of course. As if there is any point above the fray, out of the crushing, away from the grinding. No, my Love I know now that the point is simply that we we are in the fray together. That come the crushing, come the grinding, come the hospital beds and hours of waiting silence, we are together. So many follies have led us to this point, but blessedly, somehow, despite ourselves, we are here now, together. And so we can mourn and hope together. This shared fragility binds us in our unknowing and uncertainty, our sorrow and our joy.

I remember everything. I remember all the things that may never come, thanks to this unknown and unexplained growth in the recesses of my brain. I remember how terrified and uncertain you may never get when somehow our IUD short-circuited and we wound up pregnant by mistake. I remember the tears you may never cry over whether you could possibly be a mother (you could, but that’s another argument we may never have). I remember my ear that may never be pressed up against your belly, listening for heartbeats and little kicks from a life that may never grow inside. I remember that I may never watch you, clinging helplessly to your hand as you deliver a new life into the world from your own body. I remember the first steps our baby may never take, the first date she may never have, the first car accident he may never perpetrate. With all the joys and sorrows of this life, and the life that may be, and the lives that may not be, I remember these. They are ours, as the uncertainties, the fragile (im)possibilities that may or may not be.

Of course my persistent shadow self bucks against all this. It makes me want to claw my scalp off because I cannot secure anything for you or for me. What a great and terrible powerlessness this is! The only thing that could probably put it in perspective would be real powerlessness, which we have very little acquaintance with. But even so, in the midst of our white, first world dilemma we are, it seems, being brought into some true touch with real fragility, and so, I believe, with real love.

I find myself able only to give you myself, with all the unknowing of what self that may become or cease to be. I give you my weakness, for that is what I know I have left. At the center of my brain, in the patched hole in my heart, in the feeble self-constructs of my psyche, I know only that weakness remains, and by grace it remains in love. Its gift is to bring illusions of power to an end. And so I offer you my weakness, and I promise to receive yours. I will remember all that may not be, and all that never really was, and in this weakness I will hope for absolutely all that may be, and that always truly was. I will believe with you, even when I fail to believe, that God really did choose that which is weak in this world to shame the strong, and the things are not, the things that may not ever be to bring to nothing the things that are secure and established.

With all that never really was, and all that may never come for us, I am yours. I am a terrified five year old, a preacher, a backpacker, a runner, a potential brain surgery patient, a testosterone-deprived, exhausted man, an immature 8th grader laughing about butt jokes, a 16 year old who knows that no girl will ever love him. In all this, I am yours. Regardless of what never really was, or what may never be. Together we will receive what was, and what is, and what is to come.