My husband and I will celebrate another wedding anniversary this week--and it's a big one. People always ask us the same question. "What's your secret?"
We have none, because every marriage is as individual as the people in it.
You might say we've been married forever, which is pretty much true. We met and fell in love--hard--when we were teenagers. Naive. Smitten. Burning with love. About 130 miles separated us, which, looking back, was a good thing. Without text messages, cell phones or Emails, we had to rely on occasional phone calls and writing letters for the two and one-half years we dated--and waited.
We married young, too young by today's standards, as did many of our friends. Like newlyweds everywhere, money was tight and we worked hard. But we were on top of the world, madly in love, and we were together. Living in the same house. Sleeping in the same bed. After two years we welcomed the first of our four children and graduated into parenthood. That stretched us to the max.
So we blundered through, praying hard, loving our kids and each other.
We understand now what we couldn't back then. Through it all each of us in our own way tried to live as if "we" was more important than "you."
There's a flip side to that equation. "You" are more important than "me."
Tough times? Sure, we had them. Often responsibilities like work and children crowded out time together. But we had promised to love each other and be faithful until death. During the hard times we hung on tight to each other and got through it.
It's not too much of a stretch to say that love is rather like the ocean. The tide comes in, the tide goes out.
Sometimes it feels as if love has gone away and we're at low tide. That's not the time to bail out. If we wait awhile love comes back with as much power as ever, maybe more.
Storms may rage on the top and waves may crash. But way down in the depths all is calm.
Love is like that.
Marriage is like that.
We know only one way to maintain the calm, constant depths of a marriage relationship. That's to base it on faith in Christ. From the beginning my husband and I shared our faith in Jesus and we prayed for our marriage. We knew we had Help in times of stress. Our common beliefs also eliminated many of the usual sources of conflict.
I'm afraid it took us too long to understand the obvious. For years we each talked to God and read from the Bible on our own. Then we discovered the joy of reading Scripture and praying together. Now we start almost every day this way. To hear my husband thank God for me still touches my heart as nothing else can.
So here we are, my husband and I, still madly in love with each other and thankful God brought us together so long ago. We're ready to celebrate--celebrate!--another year of marriage and life. Behold, it is very good and better all the time. Honest.
May you be blessed,
Lenore
