For a guy who didn’t believe in marriage, it has been a great 41 years.
As a product of the 60’s I was anti-establishment, anti-war, and anti-marriage. After all, it was just a piece of paper. Who needed it when you could have all the benefits without going through the hoops of blood tests, ministers, and commitment?
Nevertheless, I accepted. That’s right, Barb proposed to me.
Funny thing about our generation at the time; while we were ‘anti’ on the surface, we were far more traditional on the inside. I wanted that commitment I didn’t believe in, and Barb, well, she was foot-loose and fancy-free. Not the committed type I concluded. I needed to move on.
The very night I intended to tell her to forget it, she was prepared to propose. She says she had a dream about marrying me, and took it so seriously that she made the decision before I got there. The rest is history.
Still, we shunned real commitment. We wrote our own wedding vows-minus the vows. We agreed that if it didn’t work, it didn’t work.
Well, it didn’t work.
The first year, as it is for many, was turbulent. I realized I didn’t have anything to give Barb. Unfortunately, she realized it too. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that if it hadn’t been for a professor friend of hers who counseled her to stick it out, Barb and I would have been a statistic. But when presented with a choice to leave or stay, Barb chose to stay.
Then it got worse.
You see, I was a flower child. Not only had I rejected all semblance of normalcy, I also spurned the religion of my parent’s generation. I was an existentialist, a young man without God. Not a good thing to be when your life is in the hole and the only way out is up and the only way up is by God’s gracious hand.
But I wouldn’t have any of it. I had to do it my way.
To make a long story shorter, Barb hung with me through two years of rigid eastern religious discipline which deprived her of her marital rights while I frantically tried getting out of the pit I had dug for myself.
As a last resort, I yielded to this person named Jesus Christ. Suddenly, life took on new meaning and, well, I ‘discovered’ my wife.
One of the first things we did that year was take the real vows of marriage. You know, “to have and to hold . . . ’till death do us part.”
That was over four decades, five children and ten grandchildren ago.
On our twenty-fifth anniversary we took the vows again. In front of our dearest friends and in the presence of our pastor and God himself, we tied the knot a little tighter.
The writer of Ecclesiastes teaches, “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” (4:12). In other words, it takes God to make a marriage work, to lend it strength, to hold it together. After all, he instituted it.
If there is a proof that God is real – and proofs abound – it is, at least for Barb and me, that he blesses the relationship between a man and a woman who not only make a promise, but rely on him to keep it.
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