Love For A Lifetime

Last evening we savored the joy of witnessing wedding vows for two precious friends. Encircled by beautiful young women in mint green dresses and handsome young men in white shirts and black vests, they held hands and promised to love each other for the rest of their lives. 

It has been forty years since Ron and I made the same promise to each other. Long before we had any idea what our life together would become. And by God's grace, our vows have stood the test of time, through difficult seasons and idyllic ones alike. As I watch my hair slowly turn from brown to gray, I pray fervently for many more years together. I think I am getting the hang of being married now, and it doesn't seem fair somehow that more years surely lie behind us than ahead.

Louie, Ron's best friend from high school days (and best man at our wedding), gave us a plaque for a wedding gift. He had it inscribed with these words from Robert Browning:

     Grow old along with me!
     The best is yet to be,
     the last of life, for which the first is made.

I remember being both surprised and pleased with this gift which still graces our wall, for I did not know him well. He is a brilliant, taciturn man who has remained single his whole life, still working on his family's farm. Ron drives out to visit him there when he returns to his hometown from time to time. Louie's sister coaxed him on a trip to visit us once in San Diego, many years ago. I enjoyed our conversations immensely and came to respect his quiet intellectuality and sense of humor.

Recently, while enjoying a collection of Ruth Bell Graham's poetry, I found a piece to pass on to the newly wed couple. Born in China to missionary parents, Ruth's dream was to become a missionary herself, taking the gospel of Jesus to one of the farthest reaches in the world, Tibet. After meeting and courting the young Billy Graham at Wheaton College, she wrestled in prayer and finally decided that instead of serving as a single missionary, her life would be bound up with Billy's passion for evangelism.

When they began being separated for long periods of time due to his travel, Ruth convinced Billy to move them to Montreat, North Carolina, to be near her parents. There she built the family homestead, raised five children and had a flourishing ministry in the mountains of western North Carolina even as she supported her husband's world-wide ministry.

Ruth went home to her Lord at the age of eighty-seven. I hope you, too, will delight in this, one of her early love poems.


     Train our love
     that it may grow
     slowly... deeply... steadily;
     till our hearts will overflow
     unrestrained and readily.

     Discipline it too,
     dear God;
     strength of steel
     throughout the whole.
     Teach us patience, 
     thoughtfulness, 
     tenderness, and 
     self-control.

     Deepen it
     throughout the years, 
     age and mellow it
     until, time that finds us
     old without,
     within,
     will find us 
     lovers still.