Thirty-five years ago Michael and I exchanged our marriage vows before a crowd of loving and supportive friends and family and before our Lord. It was a beautiful ceremony, complete with evergreen trees and Christmas plaid and communion. However, there would have been no wedding if a solemn moment had not occurred a couple of months earlier in a stretch of desert land that is now covered over with shopping malls and parking lots. There surrounded by desert brush with only my dog and God as our witnesses, we vowed that divorce would never be an option for us. Indeed, we committed to never speak the word in relation to ourselves. So serious were we, as young twenty-somethings, that we agreed that it would be better to never know the joy of oneness than to allow the mere thought of divorce to disrupt our union. You see, Michael had experienced the heartbreak that divorce brings from a very personal perspective and knew that he never wanted to experience it again.
By God's grace, that very first vow of a young unmarried couple made to each other and more importantly to our Lord has been kept. Our marriage has had its share of good times and also of difficult, but through it all, God has been faithful beyond all that we dreamed or hoped for as nervous young kids standing at the altar. One of the most amazing gifts, at least to me as a female, is the ever deepening love we have for each other in spite of grey hair and wrinkles and my added padding. We truly do love and enjoy each other more today, far more, than we did thirty-five years ago as newlyweds. Tonight, and every December 5th, we celebrate the start of Our Peculiar Family, marveling at God's incredible goodness to us!