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Celebrating 20 Years of Remembering

It wasn’t our first meeting. Since he was my brother’s college roommate, we knew each other and had been around one another at various times. But it was more a knowing about someone than truly knowing someone.

This time, we met in a meeting that we’d both never forget. Nothing exciting or memorable to anyone else, but to me as a freshman in college and he a senior, it was a conversation that would shape the rest of our lives—the conversation that began so many other conversations.lightstock_458_small_tgc copy

After an InterVarsity meeting, we ran into one another and began chatting. We discussed God, his Word, faith, predestination, evangelism, Calvin . . . all subjects that would shape the next 25 years of discussions between us. After going round and round from one topic to another, he looked at me and quipped, “So, what do you think about getting married?”

Five years later, we met on July 26 in front of a church, surrounded by family and friends. We danced. We laughed. We ate cake. We celebrated.

Marital Advice

It’s been 20 years since that day. Originally, I thought about writing a “20 things we’ve learned in 20 years” type of post. Most of the advice I’d share today is advice that was faithfully passed on to us:

Keep short accounts. Be for one another. Admit when you’re wrong. Forgive. Love the ones your loved one loves. Celebrate one another’s successes. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Confront in love. Overlook offenses. Pray for one another. Be compassionate and considerate. Use your date nights to have fun, not to discuss problems. Don’t make your marriage just about the children. Be interested in one another’s pursuits.

All good advice, given to us from others, that I believe more now than I did 20 years ago. But honestly, I don’t have much advice of my own. Every marriage is unique—beautiful and difficult in its own way.

And, most of the time, I feel as though I just got married. While difficult seasons of marriage can feel like they might never end, collectively the years have flown by. I’m still learning what it means to love another person, to put his interests before my own. I’m thankful for all we’ve walked through together—the joys and sorrows, the painful losses and wonderful gains. But I’m still learning how to build a marriage. Maybe in 20 more years I’ll have it all figured out? If I do, I promise to share.

Real Meeting 

Mainly what I’ve been pondering on this anniversary is that first meeting. I enjoy it more today in remembering than I did when those first butterflies of attraction took flight. I treasure him more today than ever before. Now, I view that first conversation after 25 years of knowing. There’s more pleasure in the memory because of all that has followed.

As I search for words, my thoughts pile like a jumbled mess of laundry, waiting to be sorted. Thankfully, C. S. Lewis has a way of swooping in and ordering my thoughts, bringing clarity with him. So often his words express what I cannot.

Recently I was reading Out of the Silent Planet for the first time. In Lewis’s space trilogy, the main character, Ransom, attempts to understand life on a different planet. His alien friend Hyoi explains:

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. . . . When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing into something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?

Today, I understand our first conversation in light of thousands of shared memories. In the remembering, all the additional years play before me like a slide show:

Seeing his delight as he held our children for the first time. Discussing theology over pizza. Praying together. The cup of water he tenderly placed beside me as I slumped over, facing morning sickness again and again and again. His laughter, which rings out with sheer delight. Waiting rooms that we waited in together, fearful of the unknown. Difficult and painful news we mourned together. The days we didn’t want much to do with one another: slammed doors and angry words and mounting frustration. The brave humility of an “I’m sorry” and the beauty of being forgiven seventy times seven.

Full-Grown Pleasure

I’m learning these daily moments of marriage create a full grown pleasure in the remembering. He’s the other half of twenty years of shared life—he holds the memories I forget, and I hold his. I hope we’re just at the beginning of our memories together, at the beginning of meeting one another.

In the sweetness of the remembering, it reminds me to look forward: something even better is coming. No matter how many years we’re given together, our marriage is temporary. It’s a shadow of a heavenly certainty: a better home, a better marriage, a better remembering. I’m thankful for this taste, and it makes me look forward with greater expectancy to the true feast that’s coming.

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