Today’s Equally Yoked Post comes courtesy of one of my all-time favorite bloggers, Sarah Bessey. Her first book, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to the Kingdom of God Waiting on the Other Side of our Church’s Gender Debates, will be published in 2013 by Howard Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster). This gorgeous post took my breath away when I first read it on her site about a year ago. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

There haven’t been too many marriage books or sermons that sound like what we have together.  But that’s okay – we don’t mind that. We’re used to being a bit out of step with what every one tells us to do.

It’s been nearly thirteen years since we fell in love, slow-dancing and kissing on the backroads of Tulsa, two teenagers crazy in love. Nearly eleven years since I ran down a chapel’s tiled aisle to you and nothing in our life looks the way that we thought it would or should because it’s all better than that, our dreams were too small, weren’t they?

You make me laugh and you make me think hard and new, your eyes follow only me when we walk through a crowded room, we can have entire conversations using just our eyebrows and the corner of my mouth, we laugh about how tired we are sometimes. We have gone to the high places and the low places, crossed the deserts, gained and lost and still we are dancing.

You have forgiven me when I could not forgive myself for how I had hurt you. I have held you up when you were sinking in the mires, praying joy into you. We are not perfect and sometimes, oh, I know we infuriate each other but there is that bone-deep knowing that we, this, all of it, is meant to be.

So this is what we do, we make each other better at being ourselves, better at being like Jesus, we slow-dance, my head on your heart, your breath in my hair, your hands on my wider-than-they-used-to-be hips, our feet slower perhaps because we’re moving together.

Sometimes the questions people ask or judgments they imply can make us chuckle, don’t they, my darling?

Well, who is in charge here?

We are.

Yes, but if push comes to shove, who is the leader?

We are.

But then who is the spiritual head of your home?

Only Jesus.

It’s a slow-dance still, isn’t it, my luv? You lead and I lead, we are both following His music, no hierarchy here. We move together, one body, all for intimacy and beauty, the dance of lovers that know every curve and lean into the unknown parts with full trust in the hands they hold.

I trust you completely, with every bit of our life, not because I must, not because any book commands it, not because God told me to submit, but because you earned it by loving me. And the thing that amazes some people is that you feel the same way for me, honoured among women, we submit to each other because we follow Him, we both practice playing second fiddle.

When it comes to the end, we both bear the responsibility for this love affair, for our family, for the work that we are both called to do and the love we are meant to spill out to show the God we know as Love.

You follow when I step out to a new place and I know when to slide into your new turn as a shadow and you lead us both through but usually, it’s just us, always us, trusting each other’s heart for the other, moving seamlessly, together.

It’s our embrace masquerading as a dance, our real marriage, accomplishing only loving as a picture of grace drawing near.

I write sometimes about what love looks like for us.

Sarah Bessey is a writer and a blogger. She lives in Abbotsford, British Columbia with her husband, Brian, and their three tinies, Anne, Joseph, and Evelynn. Her first book Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to the Kingdom of God Waiting on the Other Side of our Church’s Gender Debates will be published by Howard Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in 2013. Sarah is an editor at A Deeper Story, and a contributor at SheLoves Magazine. She is a happy clappy Jesus lover, a joyful subversive, a voracious reader, an unrepentant hashtag abuser, and a social justice wannabe.

Next week’s Equally Yoked post is from Ed Cyzewski.

Want to contribute to the Equally Yoked series? Email Jenny at jennyraearmstrong@gmail.com.

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