In Sickness and in Health

Five and a half years ago I married Chad Krizan. It was a remarkable day. We exchanged these vows:

I take you Chad to be my husband. I promise before God to love and respect you, to care for you and to console you, to forgive you and strengthen you, to share with you the sorrows and the joys that lie ahead. I promise to be faithful to you and honest with you. I will look to serve God and seek His direction and guidance for our lives. 

So, I guess we didn't vow to love each other in sickness and in health. Weird. Probably because we meshed a bunch of wedding vows together and had the preacher give his approval. But I think the same principle applies, which is the whole point of me writing this post. When you get married, you are so in love.... well I won't speak for you. When I got married I was so in love that all I thought about was how I wanted to become Chad's wife so I could spend the rest of my life with him happily ever after. Maybe I was young and naive to think that it would be that easy.

Sometimes I think it's harder for the spouse who does not have the chronic illness.  After all, they have to put up with the spouse who is ill and who has changed.  Because of this I always thought the well-known phrase of loving in sickness and in health only applied to the spouse who was caring for the sick spouse. God has definitely blessed me with a husband who loves me no matter how I feel or act with my migraines.

Lately I have been feeling more like I am the one that needs to love in sickness. I'm the one that's sick. Maybe God is telling me that even though I'm sick, that doesn't give me an excuse to act crazy or mean (Caylyn would never do that, would she?). These headaches do change me. And what I'm realizing and trying to do is that even though I feel terrible, I want to intentionally show love instead of letting the mean/crazy headache take over.