Miracle Tree Of August

I’m not sure what happened, but almost as soon as the ink was dry on our marriage certificate, everything seemed to go wrong for my husband and me as a couple. As nice as most of his family was, there were still a few family members who just enjoyed causing trouble, and if they could put me, or something I did, in a bad light, they did. There were also a few people in my family who didn’t help matters, either. They would pounce on any problem that they thought we might be having, making the problems that all newlywed couples have much worse.
Like many women, I found that my husband wasn’t very good at communicating. Instead of discussing our problems and trying to deal with them, my husband would just clam up or walk away. I tried to get him to understand that if we stood together as one and kept our faith in the Lord as our foundation for a strong marriage, other people would see our united front and not be any real threat to us no matter what they said or did, making our lives a lot more peaceful and happy. But as the months turned into years and my husband didn’t do any of those little things that make a wife feel special and all I got were comments that “life used to be more fun before we got married,” I slowly turned myself off from our marriage.
Oh, I did all the things I thought were right—I made his favorite foods, hemmed his pants, fixed snacks for his friends, and mowed the lawn if he was sick with a cold—but I only did them mechanically, with little or no feeling, as though I were just going through the motions. I often prayed to God, telling Him that He would have to deal with this burden if He wanted this marriage saved because I no longer had the strength to deal with the situation on my own.
One dry, hot August day, though, I stepped outside to find my husband planting a beautiful evergreen tree in the corner of our yard—something I had wanted for a very long time. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. When I met my husband’s eyes, I could see a kindness and quiet joy that I hadn’t seen in him for a long time. In that instant, the considerate things my husband had been doing for me for the past few months suddenly came to mind—things that I’d become too numb to really notice and appreciate: buying me flowers on the way home from work, listening to what I had to say, running some errands for me, and being nice to my friends.
That day, my husband and I talked together like we did before we got married and it was wonderful to share our hearts and our thoughts.
“I know I’ve been an awful fool,” my husband told me, “but it just seemed easier for a while not to deal with our problems and I guess I thought they’d just go away. But I’ll never let anyone or anything ever come between us again.”
When we left the site of our little evergreen tree we walked hand in hand, tears glistening in our eyes. My husband was wrong for getting moody, turning away from me, and not dealing with our problems head on right from the start of our marriage, but I was wrong, too. I was so busy allowing myself to turn cold and unfeeling that I couldn’t even see all of the nice things that my husband had started doing to show his love for me, and the signs of true regret for how he’d acted.
Today, we often look at our lovely evergreen tree that has grown a lot and thrived over the years, despite being planted during the dry, hot days of August. That tree has become a symbol of the united love we now share—a love that thankfully, God would not let us lose. We know that it’s truly our miracle tree of August.