A Gift Undeserved

Our wedding day - pink and blue polyester and scary hair...

When you're young and dumb and clueless you think love will get you through anything.  You say 'I do', having no idea what that will really mean, or how hard it will be to live it out sometimes. You don't know there will be moments when you'll both want to take it back, just for a minute.

It's good not to know that the odds are stacked pretty high against you to make it. Sometimes you just cling to the fact that 'God works all things together for good....'

Thirty years have flown by. That's not true. Some of them have been more of a painful crawl, some we just kept pushing ahead, making ourselves get through to the other side of whatever was standing there in the middle of the road. There have been moments when it was all honeymoon again, and we got to live again, for a bit, in the young, dumb, clueless stage - just long enough to come up for air before we both dived in again. Much of it has been hard work, but then most things worth having don't come easy, do they?

All in all, looking back, I wonder, how did I ever deserve the gift of you?

I didn't.

If you'd checked out my family tree, known all my baggage, or even taken a good look at my dental records you might not have taken the plunge, and nobody would have blamed you. I was not a good bet. We were not a good bet.

But you did, and for that I'm forever grateful. Full to the top and overflowing with a sense of how good God is to me, in the single gift of you.

You're still so much fun to play with, my best friend!

At the end of the day, and after 30 years, you're all I need, the second half of every breath I take, the one person I'd take on that deserted island and I wouldn't need a book, the best gamble I ever made, and I'd stake everything I have for at least another 20.

God has blessed us beyond anything I hoped or imagined, with our beautiful family.

And our story continues...