Saturday, July 12, 2008

Celebrating 25 Years of Marriage!

We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary on July 9, 2008. Ironically, we chose to go on our first hike of the summer season a day earlier in the Columbia Gorge, with temperatures pushing 90 degrees. I should have taken the "difficult to very difficult" rating level on the Dog Mountain trail a little more seriously. We were certainly rewarded with a wonderful view of the scenic Columbia River Gorge, but only after consuming mass quantities of water, sweating like overwrought beasts, and grumbling over the aches and pains in our joints and muscles. (By the way, don't you just want to slap those twenty-something hikers who zoom up the trail past you while you imagine yourselves doing battle at Bastogne just to ascend a few miles?!)

On our way up, both of us were musing over how our hike was a fitting allegory of our 25 years of marriage. We started out young and naive, seemingly ill-equipped and oblivious to what would lay ahead. If someone had sat us down in July of 1983 and spread out the timeline of the next quarter century of life together, I think I would have collapsed with fright and looked to make a date with the nearest piece of porcelain. God has been so faithful and good to us, though, shaping his vessels into--hopefully--more responsive and useful bondservants as we've trudged up and down the trail of tears, laughter, and abiding joy. I have grown to love and appreciate Sabrina with a depth I could never have imagined twenty-five years ago. She has become more physically and spiritually attractive to me as the years have rolled on by. Many of the trials we have faced and are facing have, at times, seemed beyond our ability to cope with. The odyssey would have been unbearable without such a loving and spiritually sensitive partner at my side. It may sound cliche to say it, but it has truly been by the Lord's grace--and His grace ALONE-- that we have been able to survive (and even thrive) through the trials and tribulations of the past twenty-five years.

It is impossible to distill all that I'd like to reflect upon in a modest blog entry, but I like how Proverbs concisely expresses the value of a great wife:

"Who can find a virtuous wife?
For her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her;
So he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life." (Prov. 8:10-12)

"Her children rise up and call her blessed;
Her husband also, and he praises her:
'Many daughters have done well,
But you excel them all.'
Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing,
But a woman who fears the Lord,
She shall be praised." (8:28-30)


Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove,
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark.
(Wm. Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.2-7)