Silver

Today is not an ordinary day. Today, June 22, twenty-five years ago, was my wedding day.

The soloist sang that pretty song from West Side Story:

Make of our hands one hand

Make of our hearts one heart

Make of our vows one last vow--

Only death will part us now.

On this day 25 years ago, my true love and I stood before the Lord in the presence of witnesses and made promises. Lots of promises. Promises that, to tell the truth, we didn't know how to keep.

We thought we knew. We felt confident, standing there, that our marriage would be different from other marriages. We were certain that we were well-equipped. Armed with our faith, our dreams, and our incomparable, inestimable love for one another, we just knew that ours would be a marriage free from common problems.

We were wrong.

We've had the common problems. We've had some uncommon ones, too. We thought that keeping our vows to one another would be a fairly simple matter. It turned out to be a very complex matter.

25 years later, we're still learning how to keep those promises we made. We're still making the mistakes that we thought we'd never make. We're still messing things up. After all these years, we're still having to figure out what those vows meant.

But by the grace of God, we're doing it together. We're doing it imperfectly--sometimes painfully--but together.

Make of our lives one life

Day after day, one life

Now we begin, now we start--

One hand

One heart

Even death won't part us now.

--Gratefully Unwrapped with Emily at Chatting at the Sky