It's amazing when 9 years feels like hardly 1...

... though technically, when you do start taking into account the little cuties on our heels, 9 seems like a good number.

Speaking of numbers, this year in celebration of our marriage I wanted to write about numbers, or specifically numbers with dollar signs and decimal places.  They say love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.  They say you cannot serve both God and money.  They say 1 in 2 marriages end in divorce and most marriages end because of money.  They say the odds of lasting 9 years in your marriage is... yeah, I looked for a stat on that one and didn't find it (though we all know 42.7% of all stats are made up).

Josh and I didn't marry for money, we married "negative money" when we married each other - dragging along the bags of school loans and high interest college sanctioned credit cards.  (Oh, if we would have been told 5 years earlier not to do such things!)  Negative money, starting a business from scratch, medical bills, ugh!  BUT even though in lack, we never fought about money.

That is until almost 2 years ago.

Josh wanted to take this financial class and he wanted me to go with him.  Personally, my first response was, "What a dumb name for a class."  My second response was a combination of anger, angst, frustration, etc, etc, etc and sadly I took our those emotions on Josh.  The only obvious reason being my pride.  (Ex. I don't need to go to a financial class, I know it all and I have everything under control.)

It saddens me to admit it, but I need to be honest - I let "money" cause a rift in our marriage.  And once again, it proved that having God at the center of my life was the most important thing to keeping our marriage together.  Though my heart was not in it fully and I couldn't smile, dragging my feet even, I choose to love God more than myself and loving God helped me to love my husband and... I went.

Now, I could go on and on about the class itself and what a blessing it has been to our finances and how subsequently being on the same page with our finances has made our marriage that much stronger, but the class isn't my main point* - us choosing to love God first is.

This year, the most important number to me is 1 - one God who united Josh and I as one for the last 9 years... Hooray!  Happy Anniversary Honey!  I love adding one every year with you!

*Though I would make it my second point and if you haven't been to this class before you should go!