Who Are Those People In The Photograph?

It’s forty years and we are not the same people.

We’ve found a quiet spot out by the Champlain Monument to watch the sunset, exchange our gifts, and eat some cake.  One of the bonuses of celebrating an anniversary at the cottage.  And it suits us.  Nothing too fancy, out in our boat (named Token Truth because the name contains both our names – see what we did there?), simple gifts, mushy cards, and 40 years of life together.

I think it’s perfectly fine that we barely resemble that couple in our wedding photos.  Because we’re not the same people we were back then.  How could we be?  Back on that day, August 19, 1978, we were just at the beginning of this transformational experience called marriage.

It changes you.  It’s changed us.  Our marriage has been the most constant and significant environment by which God has provided the opportunity for us to cooperate with Him in our becoming whole and holy, our spiritual transformation.   We haven’t always cooperated so easily.  There’s been a lot of wrestling for control, selfishness, dysfunction, baggage, and general mayhem in the mix.   But in those moments when we let God be God between us, when we chose the other over ourselves, when we pushed forward into trust over and over again, we became more together than we’d ever have been on our own. 

Martial therapist David Schnarch says, “Stop working on your marriage. Realize that your marriage is working on you.”   

In these moments sharing cake with my Beloved (in which he leaves his extra icing for me) I am overwhelmed again with the fullness of my life and the great blessings particularly of this stage of life.  I don’t know why we complain about getting old (other than the aches and pains, I get that).  These are rich years, deeply lived years, years of great reward for all of life’s labours.  Marriage has been a labour, yes.  But oh the wealth that’s been wrung from the woes! 

And of course, I have to say, that all of what I know about this is because I’m married to Ken.  Ken the guy who turned out to be just who I needed when I was a scared, insecure 15 year old AND who grew with me to become just who I need now. 

So here we are, forty years later, launching together into ways of living that are taking us places we’d never have imagined.  Receiving God’s good gift of love over and over again, despite ourselves.  Knowing that we are forever changed by one another, and the gracious way God poured Himself into this covenant we made so long ago.

Happy Anniversary Love.  I am not the same because of you.