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Do the words of the Rob Thomas song "Little Wonders" affect any one else like they affect me? Every time that song plays through my head phones or car stereo I am instantly reminded how my life and the time I have been blessed to spend with my wife and children is quickly disappearing. I am unable to sing along - lump in my throat is too large. I am even having difficulty driving or sitting unnoticed in my seat on an airplane because of tears welling up in my eyes or rolling down my cheeks. I know, I am shameful. I am embarrassing myself. I am admitting to being able to feel something that few of us macho-male types are willing to admit: my heart moves when it is reminded of what is important or when it is affected by meaning and significance. The lyrics to this despicable, heart-wrenching song go like this:


"let it go,
let it roll right off your shoulder
don't you know
the hardest part is over
let it in,
let your clarity define you
in the end
we will only just remember how it feels

our lives are made
in these small hours
these little wonders, <-------somewhere in here is when I LOSE it
these twists & turns of fate
time falls away,
but these small hours,
these small hours still remain

let it slide,
let your troubles fall behind you
let it shine
until you feel it all around you
and i don't mind
if it's me you need to turn to
we'll get by,
it's the heart that really matters in the end <------I am DONE by this point

our lives are made
in these small hours
these little wonders,
these twists & turns of fate
time falls away,
but these small hours,
these small hours still remain

all of my regret
will wash away some how <------person next to me on plane is staring at me
but i can not forget
the way i feel right now

in these small hours
these little wonders
these twists & turns of fate
these twists & turns of fate
time falls away but these small hours
these small hours, still remain,
still remain
these little wonders
these twists & turns of fate
time falls away
but these small hours
these little wonders still remain" <-----I realize "Yeah, I am a blubbering wimp"


So I ask myself, will all of my regret simply wash away? I have heard that quality time spent with our family and friends is the glue that bonds us together. Or, maybe it is the key to unlock our hearts and open them to others. In reality, quality time typically shows up, unannounced and unexpected, during quantity time. Little wonders add up to a mountain of amazement if that is true, and how many little wonders have I blown or simply missed.

I was sitting in a restaurant with my family recently, and noticed that there were several people sitting across from one another "thumbing" their mobile phones. Literally, these people are in the middle of a meal together, which is traditionally a time for bonding and socializing, and they are completely caught up in something out on the internet that makes no difference at that moment during that meal with that other person. At least, maybe that is how I perceive the other person to feel. Unless of course the other person is doing the same thing, which in this case, they were. What if they were sending text messages to each other?! I decided to stop looking around for fear of noticing more people sending text messages to each other across the table and becoming more annoyed, and then started talking to my own family. What a concept! I am not bragging and am not perfect. I just recognized something that has been bothering me more often than not these days, and it is something I struggle with as well. I guess it is easy to see our own faults in others, and even easier to point at them as their judge and jury and exclaim "You are wrong!"

I thought to myself "I wonder how that person feels watching a friend or family member 'thumb' away their time together?" Then again, maybe I am jumping to a conclusion, and the texts are being sent to let someone else in their party know where the big dinner with a long, lost friend is located. You know, so everyone can come enjoy the meal and happy time together! Right? That is possible, yes? Well, maybe. The more likely explanation is that the texts are about some person who does not even know that their acquaintances are saying nasty things about them behind their back. Or they are droning about the latest new thing to become a massive topic of temporary conversation. Or maybe they are texts being sent from one person to another and a unique and unhealthy bond could be forming. Whatever the subject, good or bad, we, myself included, are sending messages very clearly to the person sitting across from us when we choose to utilize information and neglect a relationship.

Admittedly, a new pet peeve of mine is when people send and acknowledge text messages when they are located in some of the most intimate of meetings. It seems like that is happening more and more lately. For example, I am meeting with some of my very good friends, we are having a very meaningful and constructive conversation, one of their phones makes either an audible noise or a vibration or BOTH, and the next thing I know I have lost their FULL attention. I want it ALL! Not part of your attention, not just a tad or a smidgen, I WANT ALL! I have lost their attention at a pivotal moment when I needed their attention the most. Now, when I regain their attention, I have lost the intensity in my words. Inside, I am steaming. No sharp and obvious feeling lives in my words any longer. I am struggling to not become angry, and am also struggling to find my way back to the vulnerability I started this particular conversation with. The moment I needed them for has passed. That bit, or little wonder, of information I possessed, live and in person, has not come out with the same value and meaning, if I am even able to make it come out at all now. Someone else got in the middle. Someone else got to take away from my personal and physical time invested with another person, a friend or family member, and stole from me what I rightfully deserved: quality time in the midst of quantity time!

Lately, I have become very sad. I hurt for my friends. I hurt for my family. Over the past couple of years, I have learned how fragile life truly is as a human being. In my own life, I have learned that just because I have managed to stay married for fifteen years, there is no guarantee it will always be that way. It takes a significant amount of effort and focus. My wife is the only person on the entire earth that really knows me, and there are things about me she is still learning and we have only scratched the surface. I think she would say the same things. We pour out our thoughts and feelings to one another. We spend enormous amounts of time together. We work on our communication with one another, which is a monumental task. We are both aware of just how fragile our marriage is, and just how much work it takes to keep it from flying off the tracks. Are our efforts being sabotaged? Two people, two selfish people, two people who ultimately want gratification, are living together as ONE and are expected to stay that way until one or the other dies. Is that logical? Tell me, is that normal? I look around at my friends and my family. There are marriages in those two groups that are broken by divorce or infidelity or separation, and I ask myself "Why is this happening and why is it happening so often and why to them?" The only logical clues seem to be that there must have been two separate lives pulling the ONE life apart, slowly, but surely.

Not one set of my married friends or family members got married with the intention to fail. Right? They did not believe in looking for ruin when they should have been looking for joy. They did not enter into a covenant of unity and debate on whether they had made the right choice. They joined together because they fell in love. They "felt" like it was the next step in their relationship. They "felt" they could not live without the other person. Well here is my question: what the hell do they "FEEL" now? Where did those feelings go? Oh yes, feelings, you know they betray you, right? My feelings are anger, guilt, resentment, fear, loneliness, embarrassment, ...shall I stop? Were those not the feelings I should be admitting? Should my feelings have been superficial and only been joy, love, hope, happy, and the like? A marriage, it appears to me, will not continue based on lying to yourself or your spouse. It requires real open and honest communication. It requires time and effort. How do we move past fleeting feelings and get to a point where we just want to be ONE again? I did not know how to make the connection of rejoicing. I still do not. I do know that I had once joiced, but could not seem to figure out how to rejoice. My family and friends joiced, but were and are now nowhere near rejoicing, unless separation or divorce is part of rejoicing. Like I said earlier, I do not believe any of my married friends or family members started out looking for that type of rejoicing.

If marriage were a person, we would say "Poor Marriage. It gets neglected. No wonder it is in such bad shape. It never really gets any attention. It gets pushed by the way, and so many other things take its rightful place. I am not surprised it ended so soon." It is as if marriage is set up to fail these days. We have so many options to distract us and entertain us, but we really do not have anything that aids us in the care and feeding of a marriage.

I have high speed internet at home. I have 18 Mbps (Mbps is mega bits per second) or 18,000,000 million bits per second to my home. When I first started selling internet access in early 1996, I was selling dial-up network internet access at a whopping 14.4 Kbps (Kilo bits per second) or 14,400 bits per second. People literally cringe at the thought of that wretched little amount of internet connectivity. I do. Do you have any idea how much 14,400 bits per second really is? My current resume is three pages long in Microsoft Word format. It is filled with information about my entire working career. It is roughly 57 KB (Kilo Bytes) of digital data. At 14.4 Kbps, I could send it to someone or it could be downloaded in roughly four seconds. Pretty impressive, huh? Well, we now commonly measure things in Tera Bytes or TB. Do you know how much a TB is? If you took an eight and a half by eleven sheet of printer paper, typed a zero and then a one and then a zero and then a one and kept doing that over and over (a bit of data is either a zero or a one, and there are eight bits in one byte), with one inch margins at the sides and top and bottom of the page, single spaced, then turned over the page, repeated the typing of zeroes and ones with the same dimensions, and did not stop until you had hammered out a single TB, you would have a stack of paper over twenty six miles high! That is the distance of a marathon! And I can download it at 18 Mbps, which would take about sixteen to seventeen hours at my home, but still. Is that significant or me just being geeky? Probably both, but it is becoming more and more possible to extract vast amounts of data from all kinds of sources on all kinds of subjects without even blinking an eye or breaking a sweat. I can even do it with my mobile phone now. I can create digital pictures and movies. I can post them instantly to Facebook or Twitter or Flickr or where ever I choose. I can do that all while I am sitting at breakfast or lunch or dinner, in a meeting, at my desk, in my car, on a plane, at a Starbucks, or an endless list of other places. What about music and movies? I had over one hundred cassette tapes when I was a kid. I had an amazing collection of music by most standards at the time. I even had eight track tapes and vinyl records. I now have more music than myself and my friends combined possessed, and I have it all on my laptop and my mobile phone in a digital format. In 2010, is it conceivable that I might possibly become distracted from my wife and kids? From my marriage? From my friends? From my real life?

I have not even scratched the surface on the amount and variety of distractions that exist today. Video games or online gambling, for example, take up significant amounts of people's time now, and they are typically a single individual playing out a fantasy on their own. Distractions do replace or get in the way of our relationships, and could create separateness. Separateness could be a significant reason for ONE to become two again. When that happens, are we then left vulnerable? I would think so.

The internet is not evil, and I am not advocating that it is the reason marriages are failing. However, it is interesting that in an age where we have far more access to information and far quicker than ever before we are seeing marital devastation far more often. We have more to distract us from our most valued relationships than ever, and I wonder if all those little wonders are not being neglected as a result. It is so much easier now to just text someone rather than go through that ordeal or hassle of actually having to talk to someone. It is much easier now to write an email and pass information to someone rather than take the time to write out a note by hand and hope that the postal service delivers it in a reasonable amount of time. Who wants to wait for that? Who wants to wait for anything any more?

About a month after we got married, we attended a wedding for one of my wife's cousins that she grew up with, and who has since divorced the girl he married that day. It was held in the same setting where we got married: outdoors, old country town in Arkansas, attended by lots of family and friends. I remember looking at all of the old ladies seated and waiting for the ceremony to begin, and I remember all of the old men sitting with them or standing next to them providing shade on that hot day in July. These were married men and women who had lived through the Great Depression, World Wars, many Presidents, children, grand children, and in some cases a whole lot of bad things that inevitably find their way into all of our lives. But, they were still together. After all those years, after all those world events or crises, after all of those times of trial, they were still ONE. Some of those marriages had lasted over fifty years. Today, some have lasted over sixty. I remember, vividly, thinking "How did they do it? How did they last that long?" I had those thoughts one month into my own marriage that has now lasted fifteen years, and I am still wondering the exact same thing all these years later. Especially in the wake of the marriage that began that day, and ultimately ended shortly after.

When I think of marriage, I think of love. I also think of like. Liking someone and loving someone are not the same thing, but love is a critical ingredient to marriage. What is love?

"Love is patient
Love is kind
It does not envy
It does not boast
it is not proud
It is not rude
It is not self-seeking
It is not easily angered
It keeps no record of wrongs
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth
It always protects
Always trusts
Always hopes
Always perseveres
Love never fails"

That does not sound like how my marriage relationship started out. I even wonder if I have witnessed that kind of love in my entire life. How am I going to measure up to love like that? How do I even mimic it? One day or one step at a time is all I can focus on. Liking the person I am married to also makes the difference.

Let me be honest, I am privy to some very sensitive information. Information that would shame and emotionally hurt people if I were to tell someone else, or in some cases, even if they knew I knew it at all. I cannot judge or condemn. I am no different than any one else. I am human and full of flaws. I will tell you that I do not know where my own feelings went when the good ones got replaced by some bad ones, and where they went is still a mystery to me. But, I do know they went as far away from the person I married as they could have, and somehow, in spite of it all, we still justified staying together. Becoming parents was not the answer to our problems. Any parent will tell you children only add stress to a marriage. Sometimes, people get lost in their children, and never find a way back to one another. Buying a home was not the answer. That only adds another responsibility to the mix, and can allow financial stress to create a fissure in a relationship. Becoming more successful was not fixing anything. If anything, that was a detractor. The more money you make, the more that is expected of you. In today's world, business can be conducted globally. Flying around and spending time on the road for work takes you away from your family and friends, and that does not bode well for a marriage when you are separate on a regular basis for extended periods of time. So then what caused two to become one to become one and a half on the way to two again? Life. Distractions. Selfishness. Responsibility. Demands from all kinds of sources. Are any one of those happening to me or my wife? Yes. Are any one of them capable of crippling my marriage? Yes. What prevents those things from destroying a marriage? Well, I became callous and without the regard and feeling for my wife that I started with when our marriage began. I dove into a sea of selfishness, and swam around for a while, for years, playing and focusing on me. Subtly, telling myself that it was for the benefit of my family. That is dangerous ground to tread, for certain.

One day, around Thanksgiving, about six or so years ago, I caught a glimpse of the girl I dated and eventually married. She was doing something usual, but I saw her, really saw her, for the first time in a long time. Things changed at that point. Things got really good and we spent time together like we had when we first got to know one another. We had fun, we laughed, and we talked. Then, you know what happened next? Things went down hill again. She got to the point where she had extreme difficulty with me. And you know what happened? Things got good again. Better than ever. And the cycle of our marriage continues. Not long ago, we went through another difficult time in our marriage where we were both discovering things about ourselves. We re-kindled interests we used to have or denied ourselves of, and began to indulge in those interests. What was the result? We worked through some very tough emotions. We talked through hurt feelings. We were honest without agenda, and we tried to better understand each other. Today, we are closer than we have ever been, but we have both walked through some tough moments where it would have been easier to just walk away from one another and leave our children to pick up the pieces. I am thankful to God for my wife and our marriage. It has been the most work I have ever had to put into anything in my entire life. It is never, and I mean never, easy, but it is worth it. Anything worth having is worth working for.

I did not want to write this note. I feel like I had to, and I can not seem to stop. The story is not over even when I finish typing this note. This note will be digital proof that I am working hard to build a relationship with my wife in a time when there are things like Facebook Notes that serve to only distract me from my most important work: loving my wife and loving my kids. Those are my little wonders. The wonders that give me joy. Neglecting them would destroy me emotionally. I hurt for my family and friends who are struggling to keep their marriages in tact. I hurt for the sacrifice of real relationships only to gain information that is not relevant to those relationships. But I am committed to my own marriage, and I will not regret the few moments I have been given to live as a young man, married to a young woman, with the voices of little wonders still living under the same roof with us. We are ONE.