Sixteenth Wedding Anniversary

Last Friday Rick and I celebrated sixteen years of marriage - sixteen years! When I was younger, I used to think that sixteen years was a long time. I used to think, I'll never be old enough to put sixteen years behind me, and remember it. Well, I guess I was wrong. As early as last year, I remember thinking that our wedding seemed like it had just happened, like it was just yesterday. I think since we've been through such a difficult year, it seems like our wedding happened ages ago. Now it's like a historical event you read about in a big, thick, dusty book. There's a line in a Third Day song that says something to the affect of, "forever's just as far as yesterday;" Well, that's how I feel.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that our anniversary, our love, or our commitment to one another is diminished in any way, because of the difficulty we've been through; In fact, maybe it's just the opposite. Honestly, I think we've hit a milestone in our marriage. It's as though we've just come out of the smooth sandy honeymoon stage of our marriage, and we've hit bedrock - the solid foundation.

I think every marriage needs to go through that, in order to stabilize, be strong and learn to weather storms. I remember thinking and saying the entire ten years we struggled through miscarriages that if we hadn't gone through those hard times, maybe we wouldn't have a greater appreciation of the good times. I think that still, and maybe even more greatly as we continue to struggle through one of the hardest times our marriage has ever been through.

Can I tell you a story, because I LOVE amusing stories - it's what I live for! On the night of our anniversary, we went out to dinner. We went to Aqui's, a local Cal-Mex restaurant. Because it had been a long day of home-schooling, we didn't even get there until after 9pm. Getting a table far away from everyone, it looked like it could be a quiet, intimate dinner, but God always gives us just a little more than we bargain for.

We sat down at the quiet table, and right as we sat down came another couple sitting right behind us near the door. They were young. I would have assumed they were on their first date. I barely noticed what they looked like, but just their body language would intimate that they were not entirely comfortable with each other.

I would say that at this point in our marriage, sometimes it is enough to simply be together, and after hours and hours of home-schooling, that was about all we could muster on this night. It wasn't long that through our quiet we could hear the excited discussion that erupted behind us.

"I scored really high on my SAT's," said the young man.

"Really, how high?" said the gentle, soft voice of the young woman.

"Really high, like 800."

I laughed to myself, shared with Rick what he hadn't heard, and said, "That's not that high. I think I'd keep that to myself."

"Oh," the boy corrected himself, "Yeah, I meant 1600." The young man was really loud and seemingly got louder as he spoke. It would have been difficult not to hear him.

"Wow, he's suddenly doubly smarter than he was just two seconds ago," I said, "with a perfect score now. Amazing!"

The young woman must have told him her SAT scores, but her voice was soft and you could not hear her.

Then, he began, "I'm really smart."

"Ugh," I said to Rick, and we both laughed. "Don't you disqualify yourself from all intellectual conversations when you have to TELL someone else how smart you are?"

"Yeah," Rick said. "You hope it's obvious, so you don't have to tell everyone."

The young man continued, "I don't need a high school diploma. None of that matters. All of those grades are disqualified after so much time."

The young couple was behind me, and I hadn't gotten a close look, so I asked Rick in a whisper, "How old are these two?"

He peeked around me to see better, "Mid to late twenties."

"Weird," I said. "I wonder why he's holding onto high school and SATs?" Rick shrugged.

Then, the soft, timid voice that had throughout been entirely quiet got loud; "Are you saying that you think you're smarter than me?"

"Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm," I shook my head. "Does it look like there are are any sharp utensils on their table?" I asked Rick. He shook his head again.

Again, louder, "Are you? Is that what you're saying?"

'For the sake of your own life Boy, say no,' I thought, but he kept going; "I'm just saying your degree means nothing."

She exploded, "How can you say that to me? Do you know how insulting that is?"

Apparently, he did not, because he continued; Loudly, he said, "Degrees mean nothing. I'm a genius and I don't need a degree to prove it to anyone," How he got that out without laughing, I'll never know.

Rick and I were silent, waiting for the punch line: There was none. At one point when the young man had gotten really loud, I had turned casually in their direction to steal a quick glance. The young man was leaning on his elbows onto the table, taking up more than half of the surface. He was smiling an arrogant, coy smile at the girl in the midst of insulting her. Was this his come on to her, because he had this disconnected look, as though Don Juan had given him private lessons. I thought, maybe he's trying out some new-fashioned dating tactic, like what the military does with new recruits: Tear them down to build them up. Had he been a genius, as he claimed, his brain should have been exclaiming, "Retreat! Retreat!," but he continued to insult her.

Clearly, his physical looks had taken up the better of his time. He'd forgotten to enlist any of that effort on furthering his intelligence, or humility. Smartly, the girl had recoiled from him, arms folded tightly to her chest. She was pretty and diminutive, and her body language spoke volumes to that fact that this date was over.

"Do you think we should offer her a ride home?" I asked Rick, but before I could even get that question out, she shot up from the table and stormed out the back door. Slowly, stupidly the young man got up from his chair with a Cheshire-cat grin and followed, making sure to not break stride from his cocky, genius, slow swagger.

"I tell you now, if ever our son treated a girl like that I'd tackle him onto the ground and have to be hauled off by a S.W.A.T. team and a K9 unit."

Rick nodded, "He'd never," he said. "That's funny. I was thinking the same thing - how Austin would never think of doing something like that."

"And," I said, "if our girls sat through something like that for as long as that poor girl did, I'd tackle the boy to the ground and have to be hauled off by a S.W.A.T. team and a K9 unit." Rick nodded again and laughed.

I felt sorry for that girl. I mean, she gave this guy a chance, and somewhere in the process of being asked out by that guy and getting treated profoundly rude, he must have bamboozled her with kindness somewhere along the way. She was smart enough to leave him eventually, so I doubt that had she known from the start how it would have ended that she would have given him a chance at all.

What I learned that night on my sixteenth wedding anniversary from this young couple's troubled date was that there's just a few simple things about romantic relationships that are true across the board: First of all, everyone wants to be loved; Everyone wants to be treated with respect, and no one wants to be treated with haughty, superiority by their romantic partner, whether that person is just a momentary prospect of love, or a long-time companion. It's all stuff you know, but sometimes it's the stuff that becomes painfully obvious when you see it displayed to the contrary of what it should be.

In the same way we are to build our faith on something solid and lasting, we should also build our marital relationship on the things that last - the things that won't fade and give way to age, time, and difficulties: Jesus was speaking about faith when he said, "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash" (Matthew 7:24-27).

For Rick and I the rain continues to come down, the streams have risen, and the winds blow still, but finally, after a couple of years of this blustery storm I am becoming thankful for the test. I know that "suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us" (Romans 5:3b-5).

Having miscarried six times in ten years, I know that I was never able to fully submit to God's authority until I was truly thankful for the testing of my faith: That is truly where you find your breaking point, and sometimes you just can't be fixed until you're fully broken. If you've ever tried gluing a broken piece of ceramic or porcelain you know what I mean. You can't really fix or glue the pieces if they're just cracked. The glue is clumpy and the very best you can do is to smear the glue across the fissure if the item is just cracked, but that's not a real fix. To fix it, you need to break the pieces apart, get the glue right along the broken edges, and then firmly hold them together until they're dry. For one thing, it's not a quick process, and sometimes, it gets a little messy, but oftentimes the outcome can be as good as new, and mean even more than if it had never been broken at all.