Anne Marie Miller

Category: Marriage

  • When Joy is Hard to Come By

    I’m a little late in the game (no pun intended).

    My husband and I just started watching Friday Night Lights. For the longest time, I refused to lay eyes on the show. I grew up in West Texas, and the Odessa Permian Panthers (the Dillon Panthers in the show) were probably our biggest rival. My sophomore year, at a basketball game, as I was going up for a lay up, a very fast Panther power forward threw her arm into my back and slammed me into a cinderblock wall which messed my knee up badly enough I had to go to physical therapy for a year and couldn’t play basketball competitively anymore. Not watching Friday Night Lights was my boycott, my personal commitment to not give anything Panther related a second of my time.

    But then we started. And you guys, if you haven’t watched Friday Night Lights and you have Amazon Prime or Netflix, just go. Take a six-week leave of absence and dive in.

    Friday Night LIghts

    Enough of that.

    (But really, go watch it).

    Last night, one of the characters (the QB1, or starting quarter back), Matt, had a really bad day. I won’t go into it all, but everything that could possibly go wrong, did. I think we’ve all had days like that. You maybe don’t feel the best, you get the phone call that something bad has happened, you don’t get any sleep, you were so late for church you ended up staying home, you drop everything on the floor, you lose your keys, a friend isn’t responding to you, your dog is sick, you feel like you’re a fake at your work, you take it all out on your spouse with angry crossed arms and irrational accusations.

    If that isn’t you, I can assure you that the things I just described happened to me in the last three days.

    Please don’t hear that as a pity party. I had my pity party. I’m okay.

    But you are not alone when you’re so stressed, you want to change your name and move to Malaysia.

    My mini-crises ended up with my husband loving me so beyond what I deserved, that my façade of toughness and meanness broke. Tears spilled out with words of my perceived truth. And I use the phrase “my perceived truth” because once I actually spoke my fears, my hurts, and what the voices in my head were telling me, I started to see them as the lies they were. And if I didn’t see something as a lie, Tim was there to gently direct me back to find truth again.

    I was lucky. I haven’t had someone with me every time I’ve found myself so far away from joy, but in the last few years, I’ve learned something about when this happens.

    • Don’t ever drink more than a couple of glasses of wine
    • Talk to someone anyway

    The death of a brilliant actor looms over us all, a life cut too short by an addiction to something that brings a deep sense of peace. That’s why we escape. When we look in our faces and minds and spirits and hearts and we’re far away from the God who loves us and His truth, when the pain feels like a red-hot black hole inside our chest, we want to escape it. Some do it with needles, others run into the arms of a one-night stand. I’ve used alcohol and food and sleep to run away before.

    Photo by Vincepal

    In 2011, I was physically sick from my anxiety. I layed down on cool tiles of a hotel bathroom floor in Orlando at 3 am, finally finding the courage to reach out a couple hours later. A few weeks earlier, I asked a small group of people to be my friends. It sounds clunky and unsexy, but it’s one of the best decisions I made.

    Asking someone to be a friend is one thing. Telling them when you’re lost and hurting is another.

    Pushing through awkward words and my greatest fear of rejection, I reached out. I got help. I was a weighty, heavy, burdened and hurt girl and I needed to be carried. My friends carried me. I could lean on them.

    If you’re in that place today where you can tangibly feel the pain of lost joy searing you, or perhaps you’re so far beyond hurting that you’ve numbed yourself into apathy, please reach out.

    We worry that we’re going to be a burden to someone. Here’s the catch. Not one of us is a burden.

    Are the things we’re going through burdens? Maybe. But you, a person, are not a burden. You are flesh and blood and skin and bone and pain and hurt and yes, even joy. There is joy for you and you may have to fight through ten thousand armies of evil to see it again.

    But you don’t have to fight alone.

     

    ***

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  • Why I posted My Ugliest Wedding Picture on the Internet

    Tim and I have these photo frames behind our couch. There’s about twenty of them, all arranged in a fun little pattern.

    Problem?

    They still have the photos that came with them inside them.

    Y’all, we’ve lived here since August.

    Last week I had the flu, and on a particularly quiet day, figured we might as well select and print some photos to go in the frames. (We have guests coming this weekend, let’s be honest.)

    As we went through our wedding pictures, one popped up on the screen that had us both in hysterics. Why? Because I’m wiping my nose. Very clearly wiping my nose. And somehow my nose has morphed into a pig-like shape.

    It was late and I thought it was cute and funny so I posted it thinking the few people who would be on the Interwebs so late would get a kick out of it, and it would be buried before morning came.

    An hour and 10,000 views later, I realized people are on Facebook way too late.

    But you know what? I’m glad I posted my ugliest wedding picture on the internet. One, because I think we often try to post the best versions of ourselves – never the ugly cry ones. And two, because this was the moment after we read our vows to each other, our hand-written, self-made, God-fearing vows. It was just the two of us on that beach, and the preacher, and the photographer. And a homeless man. But it was one of the most intimate and sacred moments I’ve ever experienced in my life.

    There’s no reason I am ashamed of having an ugly cry and wiping my dripping nose before being pronounced husband and wife. And no regret in posting in on the internet in a moment of silliness.

    (In a related note: I love you Tim Miller. And I will fight every day to honor and love you the best I can.)

    Anne Miller Tim Miller Ugliest Wedding PIcture

  • My Word for 2014 – Dangit

    It seems like everyone is doing a “One Word” theme for 2014.

    At first, I roll my eyes. I don’t need to define my life and goals for a year with one word. I’m focused enough. Legalist Me says “It’s always God anyway” and Mystic Me says “It’s always Love anyway” (and yes, that’s kind of one of the same).

    Already procrastinating on two of my resolutions goals for 2014 – working out 3-5x/week and running 150 miles this year – I make sure the world hasn’t ended because of my absence from Twitter the last few days.

    I see my friend Sarah Mae tweet a link to a post about a gal named Dana who makes her word for 2014 Mike, her husband. In it, she links back to the post where Sarah Mae makes her word for 2014 Jesse, who’s Sarah Mae’s husband.

    Then I say dangit, because I felt smacked upside my head with a burlap sack of coffee beans (drinking coffee: something I have yet to also do this morning).

    Realizing dangit doesn’t really give me a theme word for 2014, I quickly change my word for 2014 to Tim. My super romantic, epic proposaling, tall, dark and handsome, Godly man extraordinary Tim.

    We haven’t even been married but ten months, but somehow in those ten months my selfishness, my snark, and my stubbornness get in the way of a great marriage. My baggage, my lack of trust, oh – and did I mention my selfishness? – can put a wall up between us.

    I already had a list of resolutions: spiritual, physical and career and I’m not going to abandon them. However, I’m looking over them all and making sure they are in line with the obvious responsibility of loving, respecting, and placing Tim as a priority in my thoughts and actions, words and deeds.

    One of my goals was to reboot the “Change Me” prayer I wrote about last year; I recognize I cannot change anyone, Tim included. But I can pray to change myself. I choose to accept him and his strengths and weaknesses, to love him, to care for him, to support him, to encourage him, to do what I can to propel him forward in his faith and in his career (a fabulously gifted man behind a camera).

    There are so many ways to be PC online: don’t make resolutions (or call them goals, instead). Make them. Post them. Don’t share them. Everyone has their own opinion about it, so, please do as you please.

    However, don’t be like me and be closed off to the idea of doing something – like creating a word for 2014 that is your theme word – and miss out on an opportunity to do something amazing.

    For God.

    For you.

    And maybe even for someone else.

    Us on our Wedding Day
    Us on our Wedding Day