Almost Fifty

May 19, 2020

In a little over two weeks, Linda and I will have been married for fifty years. On and off over the past year, we’ve talked about what we would like to do to celebrate. For our 25th, our children and the church sent us to England for ten days, and even bought round trip tickets! We had a wonderful time, and promised ourselves we would go back, but never did. We talked about a trip to Europe, or out west to see the Grand Canyon, but couldn’t settle on anything that really grabbed our hearts. Which was probably a good thing, because we don’t have reservations we need to cancel!

We still don’t know what we will do. Fifty years is certainly a milestone, but we are content with where and who we are right here at home. If restrictions lift enough, we may be able to go to dinner somewhere, but even that isn’t really important to us. Being together is. In today’s Facebook feed, we learned of the death of a high school classmate of Linda’s—a beautiful woman who bravely battled pancreatic cancer for the past year. She and her husband didn’t have the privilege of celebrating fifty years. From the looks of it, we will.

The long and short of it is simple: we have experienced grace and goodness from the Lord; speaking for myself—far more than I could ever deserve. We have all we need, can’t think of anything we want, and are blessed in many ways to be on the giving side of things. Even if all the COVID drama playing out all around us should prevent us from a flashy celebration, it cannot take from us what we’ve built over the past fifty years, and cannot destroy the love we share. I’ll probably have more reflections on this as the day approaches, but today it is enough to look back as we look forward to the actual day with gratitude.