Why We Work

Do you wonder how two friends, fellow authors, crit partners, and now in-laws are going to survive all this closeness? I’m not and here’s the backstory of why.

It begins with how Kim and I met. In case you haven’t already heard it, my husband joined the military at 46. Our son had just graduated from West Point, our daughter got married six weeks later, my in-laws went into assisted living three weeks after that, and my husband left for the chaplain corp equivalent of basic training five weeks after that. Yeah…the summer of 2009 was busy!

Nine months later, after he’d completed his training and we’d moved from Oregon to Colorado, he deployed for a year. It was the first time in our nearly twenty-six years of marriage we’d been apart for that long. On his way out the door to Afghanistan, Nathan took my face in his hands and said, “This is not going to be a wasted year for either of us. You will–do you hear me, you will–do something about all those stories you’ve written over the years.”

Three months later, I met Kim at a writer’s group. She invited me over to her house and asked me to bring my WIP (or Work In Progress) for a quick critique to judge my skill level. She took about five minutes, made probably twenty red-marks, and utterly destroyed my entire story with one question… “Is this historically accurate?”

It wasn’t. And there went ten years of my life. Not full-time, but ten years of on-and-off writing. I took about five seconds to swallow down my disappointed ego and put the entire 369 page manuscript on a bench before saying, “Okay. Teach me how to write.”

That was the beginning of our friendship.

Fast forward to today. My husband and I are reading “Sacred Marriage” by Gary Thomas. His premise is that marriage is a great place to refine your character, including learning the skill of forgiveness. What Kim did to my manuscript required forgiveness–not in the traditional manner, but it was a variation on that theme. She destroyed something dear to my heart. I know…I know…I asked her to, but still.

So what does that have to do with the picture of Steven’s hands on Kayla’s back. Do you see that big, honkin’ ring on his right hand. It’s a size twelve. Steven assumed that meant his wedding ring would need to be the same size, so that’s what he told the jeweler who melted Kayla’s promise ring into a gold band we had to create his wedding ring. It was waaaaaay too big, which is why he has that black silicone band holding his gold band in place.

Now if Kayla had been in New York with Steven when the discussion of what size ring he wore was taking place, she would have gotten him out to a jeweler to measure his ring size (like his mother–a.k.a. ME–told him to do). Turns out he was off by almost three full ring sizes. Did Kayla throw a fit and give Steven a hard time about not taking care of something so important?

Nope. She shrugged it off and the two of them figured out a temporary solution.

And that’s how I know Kim and I are going to be just fine. (Steven and Kayla are going to be just fine, too.) Because of forgiveness.

Kim and I are coming up on ten years of friendship this fall. In that time, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to correct one another both professionally and personally. We’re still great friends because Kim and Jeremy figured out how to forgive one another, Nathan and I figured out how to forgive one another, and learning how to forgive in marriage has carried over into other relationships–namely the one between Kim and me. We’ve taught it to our children. All of us are going to have plenty more opportunities to exercise that forgiveness muscle in the years to come.

But given our history together, I’m confident we’ll continue to work long into our future.