We speak another language, my husband and I.

We learned it together, sitting at our kitchen table in Haiti with sweat dripping down our backs.

We followed scribbled letters on a broken piece of blackboard and wrote notes in 19 cent notebooks from Walmart, purchased the fall before our move.

I learned the written words long before my husband did. I sat with him as he struggled and fought through the book learning that he hates so much. I watched him determinedly choose to die-to-self day after day after day, and do the thing he disliked simply because it was what God called us to.

And I smiled in awe as he mastered the spoken language long before his book-learned wife could even begin to communicate with the Haitians. He’s a lot smarter than me, this man of mine. While I could open the Creole Bible and read to myself, he could sit down with a Creole-speaking person and tell them about the love of Jesus.

I love that about him. 

And I love that now, years later, we can speak to each other in another language. I love that we mix Creole and English and that mwen remen ou means the same as I love you to both of us.

And I love that every time I hear my husband speak to me in Creole, I can picture that long kitchen table and feel the sweat on my back, and I know that he pictures and feels the same thing.

It’s shared history. And it’s priceless.

The Challenge:

Do you speak another language with your husband? It might not be a “technical” language, but perhaps you have certain phrases, certain inside jokes, certain memories that are all your own?

Have you taken time to acknowledge and love the shared history between you?