Fifty Years!

Dear Friends,

My mother dined out on the following story for a long time. When she was at the grocery store one day with most of us in tow, I think I was home from work and the driver, and the general minder of three of my brothers. Someone asked her in that conversational way about all of us, and my mother introduced me and my siblings and noted that there were two others. The woman replied, “You mean you had all of these with the same husband!”

I can attest that she did and she lived to see 51 years of marriage with my father, Leo. Although sadly her 50th anniversary, which she always imagined as a big blow-out party, came when she was so ill that we arranged for take-out to be delivered and served to them at home. My husband’s father died when he was a senior in high school, he and his mother would have been married 25 years the year that happened. In the safe of the hardware store that he owned with his brother they found the diamond that I wear. My mother-in-law gave it secretly to my husband before our 20^th wedding anniversary so that he could do what his dad was never able to do for her, give it to the woman he loved. I am a tad superstitious about making it to the 50-year mark intact.

What my husband always says about marriage is that it is to be a grand adventure! I am grateful that while we were both unchurched at the time, we started that adventure by being married at University Lutheran Church of Hope in Minneapolis by the pastor who later became a Lutheran bishop. What he said to us about God and Christ as we prepared for that service left a wide-open door for us to come back to church and eventually, we walked through it.

We have had plenty of adventures. From literally boating up a river in Belize full of alligators to an ancient Mayan ruin, to coaxing our little Fiat 128 to get through a November snowstorm in the Great Smokies so we could get home to Minnesota on our last leg from visiting family in Atlanta. A honeymoon spent riding cable cars in the fog in San Francisco, and seeing Disney Land in the rain was a preview of things yet to come.

Then there is the arrival of our daughter from Korea, the last flight out of Chicago on a snowy day in March, the tornado that ripped apart the houses two away from ours while I sat in the basement with very distressed cats, and Peder endeavored to finish his master thesis design for architecture at the University of Minnesota oblivious to the sirens. That was an interesting post-trauma spat! It’s fifty years so the tales are as long and endless as the years of love, and promise, of disappointment and triumph. It is all shot through with blessing and grace. God has sticky fingers all over our lives.

I am so grateful to you all for this time celebrating being married for so long. We both know that it is no small miracle sometimes that we are arriving at this when so few in our family rarely do. We are blessed to be in this adventure called Grace and for your generous Christ-filled spirit toward us.

God’s peace and keeping,

Mary!