I’m dating someone I get along with really well. As in, if I had to guesstimate, we get along like 98% of the time.

We have just enough conflict (and conflict is good, by the way) that I know we’re both not pretending to be people that we’re not and just enough conflict to know how we’d work it out, but we have so little of it that, as a former conflict-habitual-relationship sufferer and as a woman who used the phrase Matthew 18’d like a verb at her former church, it unnerves me just a tad.

As in, is it really supposed to be this easy? As in, something must be wrong with us; it just can’t be this easy. Caveat: to be clear…lest you all picture Tall-Shadow and me skipping through fields of wildflowers without a care in the world, we do still have our issues: distance, schedules, weather, and other outside obstacles that we’re up against. But thankfully, between us: easy.

So I was talking to a girlfriend about this, because that’s what girlfriends do. And she was telling me how she and her husband had each been in relationships that were rife with drama prior to meeting each other. And how when they started dating, they kind of looked at each other like, Umm, this is too easy. Aren’t we supposed to fight and stuff?

But then they realized that the “easy” was how it was supposed to be and that because of the ease, they were able to focus on other things, like enjoying each other and serving individually and together as a couple.

I’ve talked many times before about how my difficult marriage was my primary focus, no matter what I was doing during that almost two decades. That though I mothered and tried to create a safe haven of a home and wrote books and spoke and led a few ministries and was on staff at church and journeyed to third-world countries, though I was of course trying to focus on those things and do them well, because of the energy I had to expend on my marriage, I was basically (and pardon my French) half-ass-ing my entire life.

And twenty years of that can get you used to that.

And when fighting is your norm, and wondering what’s really going on is your norm, and finding hidden secrets is your norm, and not trusting is your norm, and trying to decipher coded conversations is your norm, you start to think that all of that is NORMAL, how it’s supposed to be.

But let me let you in on a little secret: it is not normal.

Not only is all of that not normal, it is not at all what God intended for marriage. It is the opposite of what God intended for marriage.

Easy (and I say easy meaning, not as in a piece of cake or simplistic or requiring no effort or self-sacrifice or compromise, but as in natural, with an ease…don’t write me on this one, you know what I’m saying) is the norm. Easy is a gift. Easy is a blessing. Easy is what God intended.

So, I’m not going to fight the easy. I’m no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop. (There is no other shoe.) I’m going to enjoy it and embrace it and be grateful for it.  Because living out life as God intended is a sweet, sweet thing.

If this post helped you, I would encourage you to check out “Living through Divorce as a Christian Woman”, found here, or “Unraveling: Hanging onto Faith through the End of a Christian Marriage”, found here.