Saved by Grace

The youth pastor of our old church in KC had a gift for designing really great t-shirts and logos. One of my favorites was a black t-shirt that said Naughty by Nature in small white letters on the front and Saved by Grace on the back. It was one of those fits-just-right shirts that I ended up wearing so much that Jen called it my uniform. One day as I passed a coworker he took a look at the shirt and called out, "Grace...is that the name of your wife?"

Never have truer words been spoken. Jen has truly been a salvation, saving me from myself time and time again. Like a dam channels and makes useful a wild untamed river, so is Jen to me.

I live with my head lost in the clouds about 90% of the time so it would be really easy to have this blog be a boring exercize in belly gazing narcissism. Actually, that was my plan. I wanted a place to put my thoughts in black and white and maybe slowly invite 1 or 2 people to read them. That all changed when I checked our e-mail this morning I saw quite a few e-mails entitled RE:Blog. Sweet Jimmy, Woman! Sooooo.... although I will be writing about things that excite and interest me I would like this blog to be primarily about other people. If you have a blog send me the address and I'll link it on my site. For some reason I'm having a hard time linking to Mac sites but I'm working on that. I had actually been planning on writing today's blog about Jen and perhaps that's why she wanted all the witnesses.

Chaco, mi sweet Chaco

I first saw Jen in the spring of 1988 in a small 2x3 photo on a page filled with pictures of the teenagers we would be going to Kenya with that summer. They say that people with goals succeed and those without goals fail, so I quickly made it my goal to make out with her sometime that summer. Some people go on mission trips to help people in distant lands, I went on mission trips to make out with chicks in distant lands. Although we never did kiss that summer, she caught me hook line and sinker. Over the next 8 years we wrote, visited, ran up enormous phone bills, crossed wires, stopped writing, stopped calling, went out with others, couldn't forget each other, started writing and calling again and eventually completey smitten, I moved up to Minnesota and we got married a year later. Jen is a realy hard person to forget, she gets under your skin and before you know it she's there for life.

The first thing that gets you is her gorgeous face; big expressive brown eyes that seem to be lit from within, a disarming smile full of perfectly aligned bright white teeth and all those cute little freckles. As if that weren't enough throw in her strong jaw line, dimples and a never ending procession of the cutest haircuts and we are talking about one hot i-talian mama! And she is so versatile, she has so many looks depending on time of day, hairstyle, makeup, lighting, etc that it is like being married to five women at one time. The beauty I have seen in her face has been burned into my mind in a thousand little snapshots that would be sufficient to sustain me for a lifetime were I to go blind. The world is full of beautiful women but there is only one whose face I cannot forget.

Jen has this gift of disarming me when I am full of fury and attacking her with my verbal six shooters. I can rant and rave and she can respond as if I had just asked her to pass the butter. In the face of such grace it is hard to stay angry for long. I have never figured out how she does this and I have never managed to return the favor, but she keeps at it after all these years. She also has this rare gift of keeping me grounded when I get to big for my britches. "Hey Mr. Full of Yourself, you're not as hot as you think", she can say in the kindest and funniest of ways that usually ends up with both of us laughing.

Jen is unmistakably feminine but she is not girlie and I love that about her. Growing up with 3 brothers and very few female relatives (love ya Julie!) left me pretty clueless about how women operate. If Jen were any daintier I probably would have bulldozed right over her and we would have both been the worse off for it. She can hang with the best and roughest of em and dish it out too.

Jen is old fashioned in all the right ways too, she'll sit with me on the front porch in the dark and listen to the night noises, she'd much rather play cards than watch tv, and she bakes bread. Let me say that again, she bakes bread! In fact there is nothing Jen cannot bake or cook. I keep waiting for the day she plants a vineyard and starts making wine. It's terrible, but I get this smug pride walking down the grocery store aisles, spaghetti sauce...puhleeazze my wife makes that; cookies, no thanks Keebler, my wife will make them; store bought bread?, I wouldn't feed that crap to the the birds. It's horrible, I'm an elitist! People who are over the top and obsessively committed to excellence in their particular field or hobby get two enthusiastic thumbs up from me. Jen is such a person when it comes to the kitchen. There is no method too difficult, no act too time consuming, no amount of sacrifice too much to get things just right. I love it!

Although there are times she can drive me right up to the brink of insanity, she always has the right touch and knows when to back off, when to throw in a joke, or when it's best to just look cute. Jen can walk into a grocery store and stop right in front of the entrance and look around in a state of confusion as if she had just landed on Mars while shoppers pile up in a bottleneck behind her, but she moves about my life with a deftness and grace that keeps me coming back for more.