15 Years and Counting

This past week, my son and daughter-in-law celebrated the first fifteen years of their marriage. And while my husband and I are about to mark 44 years since our wedding, in this day and age even 15 years is a milestone. Marriage has always been hard work and not just “happily ever after”; but, sadly, in our current culture, fewer couples are willing to stick it out. Independence and self-centeredness seem to reign supreme in our society, and those qualities aren’t very useful when building a lifelong commitment to another person.

From all appearances on the surface, my son’s marriage probably shouldn’t have worked. They lived in different states over 2000 miles apart. Laura was a Midwest girl, and Scott had always lived on the West Coast. They met on a Christian dating website during the one week that they each signed up for a free trial. Their entire 18-month courtship consisted of phone calls and emails. They didn’t meet in person for over five months. The day they married, they had only been together six or seven times for a total of less than ten weeks. They still had a lot to learn about each other and about themselves.

Today they have stood strong together through two long-distance moves as well as Laura’s move across the country when they married. She left Indiana for her honeymoon to Mexico and returned a week later to her new home in a small town in eastern Washington. All of her belongings had traveled across the country while she was gone. Together Scott and Laura have shared the ups and downs of ministry, career/job changes, five moves, infertility, foster parenting, and the adoption of our four grandchildren. They have given each other the space to change and grow individually, and they have grown together.

Why has it worked? Because they are not alone in this marriage. On their wedding day, they each made a commitment to the other while both making a commitment to God. Working hard to keep loving each other has been their modus operandi, because they don’t consider divorce to be an option. The circumstances of life will continue to bring challenges that test this approach; but I am confident from my own marriage experience that God will see them through to many more years together as they keep choosing to allow Him to lead them individually and as a couple. They can’t know what the future holds, but they do know Who holds the future. Here’s to another fifteen years and even more!