On August 25, 1979, Cindi and I were united in marriage at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection in San Antonio, Texas. It was a late wedding, as the church hosted a Roman Catholic Mass every Saturday at 6pm. It was also typically hot and dry for a Texas August. If you look carefully at our wedding pictures, you can even see the grasshoppers who hitched a ride on Cindi’s wedding dress! The next morning, we had lunch with my extended family and headed for the coast. After a couple of vehicular misadventures, we arrived in Port Aransas, loaded the skiff and motored out to the Aransas Pass lighthouse for our honeymoon. A few hot days later – there is no AC in the lighthouse – we returned to Corpus Christi and began our move to Denver. A week later, I began classes at Iliff School of Theology and Cindi began her new job at Lowry AFB.
Forty-two years later, we are celebrating with a new home and taking a night off from unpacking to have an evening out with each other. It is kind of low key, but this is just that kind of year! Forty-two years – I don’t think we had any concept of what that meant in 1979. I have now been married nineteen years more than I had been alive at that point! We have shared so many things we could never have foreseen, from the sublime to the ridiculous, the gut-wrenching to the deadly boring, and the heart-breaking to the mountaintop of joy. Through it all, God has been with us in very powerful ways. In the face of sometimes overwhelming challenges, God has given us strength. And through all the years and all the changes in our lives and in ourselves, God has held us together in love. Sometimes, that is what amazes me most. I remember the way I felt that first time I heard Cindi sing. After forty-two years, our love has deepened and matured. But my heart still “jumps” when I see her or hear her sing.
Some of you will remember that, on our twenty-fifth anniversary, I talked Cindi into sharing the pulpit with me. (I tried to get her to do it again on our 35th, but….) That day, she made the profound statement that God calls us in marriage to, “Choose the one you love and love the one you choose.” How much heartache could we avoid if we all did that? In that simple statement, she captured much of the blessing of our marriage. God brought us together in love. God undergirds and strengthens the love between us. We have all the normal struggles of any married couple. But over and over, God blesses the love we honor in each other. And that makes our life all the richer.
Thank you for blessing us by being such a wonderful faith family. We pray that God will bless each of your lives as richly as we feel He has blessed ours. And for those of you who are married or are thinking of marriage, we remind you to “Choose the one you love and love the one you choose” that God may richly bless the love you honor in each other.
Grace and Peace,
Tom
PS – I remind our children that it is only 8 years to save up so you can be ready to pay for our 50th anniversary celebration in Hawaii
