We had the morning to ourselves again. The past couple of nights and days we’ve been asking for and missing each other, but the timing just has not been right. Tim has been here during the day replacing windows and fixing trim. I’ve been more tired again the past couple of days. Nights have been taken up with series shows that Dad and the kids watch together. I thought about texting, but sometimes someone is talking to Miles.

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep. I feel like sleeping times as well as arrangements is one of those discovered things about marriage where there could grow to be some serious incompatibility. What if one person goes to bed or gets up earlier? What waking for an infant was in the decade of birthing babies seems to have morphed into a different level of expected and adjusted to sleeplessness for love’s sake.

But I will go downstairs if it’s been too long and I start to sense the that 5 o’clock hour would be too early to undo the hours of thinking it took to get me back to a sleeping state. I fell back asleep thinking of my aunt, and woke to the daylight after a stark dream where I was bawling my eyes out watching a movie about her life. My parents came up earlier this month and together we watched her remembrance service here.

I’m still thinking about this Elisabeth Elliot book I mentioned, and feeling like I did not articulate the fullness of what was truly bothering me. I don’t think it was because a famous and respected Christian woman had flaws. This was woman was married three different times. Her first marriage, of course, was the famous one to Jim. Then there was the one to Addison Leitch which, and this is what bothered me, started before

his marriage to his wife of 30 years was even over. While she was battling cancer he was meeting with Elisabeth giving her compliments and kisses. It was only mentioned happening once. Was it a full-blown affair, no, but did the two of them having feelings for each other? Absolutely. Addison was remarried to Elisabeth less than six months after his wife died, and according to Elisabeth this was all such a joyous gift from God.

That was not all. Then Addison dies this horrible death from cancer only a few years later. She was sure God would heal him even as he wasted away. She accepted God’s will and nursed him for months until he died. As time went on she longed more and more for a man. There was one who had been in her life for several years, but she didn’t love him. He was not in the same league as Addison or Jim in Elisabeth’s eyes.

But she married him anyway, and then toward the end of the book the author states how Elisabeth within two weeks of their marriage had told her closest family and friends that she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. This was an intelligent woman who had known two happy marriages before and no similar statements about those marriages were reported by the author, though both had known their ups and downs.

That her third “mistake” of a marriage then lasted 38 years was disturbing. All while the happy ones were both grotesquely cut short. There were reports of her third husband being angry and controlling, even as he had been so pursuing and helpful to her in her former years of widowhood. So why was this all so disturbing to me? Because if her marriage truly was a mistake, then I feel like she should’ve been able to get out of it.