Marriage has been a blessing

I’ve been a very blessed man for the last 35 years.

That blessing began on June 12, 1982, when I got married to the most wonderful woman in the world. This week we’ll celebrate a love that has lasted.

I’m pretty sure we both figured we were in love that day, but the truth is it takes a lot of years to really realize what being in love means. Good love isn’t something you fall into like winning the lottery, it’s something you pay out on time over your lives together. It means a lot that way and you take good care of it and cherish it more that way.

My bride cried on our wedding night. She was scared, she was excited, she was happy and the emotions came out in tears. She was embarrassed by her cry, but it told me a lot about the caring person I had just married.

Over the years she kept a stiff upper lip and tried not to let those emotions out, but it was too late. I already knew there was a tender heart underneath it all. I just kept on loving her and she did the same for me.

She has treated me like a prince, even when I didn’t deserve it. I’ve never for one second in our marriage had to doubt how dedicated she was to me. I hope she’s able to say the same about me.

Years later now, she realizes it’s not weakness to cry on my shoulder and she’s been there for me when I’ve needed one to cry on as well.

The good times together, like whitewater rafting on our honeymoon, watching the stars on a mountaintop, picnicking by a stream in a meadow, quickly jump to my mind. But I know the marriage and our love would never have lasted had it not been for the seasoning that God put in our lives.

Trying to understand and sort out feelings as we’ve each lost parents, forging on in a new direction when career paths reached crossroads or dead ends, backing each others’ decisions in life and loving each other even more.

The hardest times in our marriage have been related to health challenges, some of them deadly. I didn’t think our marriage could get any richer, but when God put challenges in our way, we found out the road out of those challenges brought us even closer together. I marvel at that every day.

Rest assured, we won’t be spending our anniversary actually shooting the rapids on a raging river but we will look back with fondness on the river ride called life we’ve been on for the last 35 years. I can’t wait to see what’s around the bend.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]