Happy Anniversary to Me

Matt fancied up my tea tray this morning. I don't get this cup out very often because I know eventually I will break it. Hopefully not today.

Lucky for us both, I remembered about it being our anniversary today, yesterday just before the birthday/anniversary prayers in church. So we were prayed for, mercifully, and can do something fun today instead of going along as if it is no big deal. My previous idea of spending the day mucking out the garage will have to be postponed.

Last night, as we trudged round the block dragging the dog along behind us, it occurred to me that doing the same set of things every day with the same person is an incredible gift.

It's hard to see this with the endless stream of other people's fancy lives flowing by on Facebook, seeing smiling group photos in front of beautiful scenery or well known monuments, seeing the gorgeous food that other people are about to consume in fancy restaurants. Some of these people and their pictures are my own family, my own mother, all of my uncles and my cousins whom I reckon up by dozens, and my aunts, people I love very much. Some other of them on Facebook are people I don't really know at all. Whoever they are, I look at them and think, I wish I was on a fancy holiday and not going down to dig out something unspeakable from the back of my fridge, and then wander in to the school room and pick up the blocks…again.

The routine, the same set of things with the same set of people, occassionaly wears thin. It has this summer. But honestly, I said to myself last night, as we walked over the same pavement, the same bushes protruding out of the walk, the same lights in the same houses, the familiar sky, the dog stopping at excactly the same spot as he did the night before and the night before that, I wouldn't be willing, for all the gold and silver and airplane tickets in the whole wide world, to give it up for one single moment. And it's not because I just love doing the same thing over and over. It's because Matt is always there.

If marriage is a reflection of the nature of God–and we know that it is, whether it be a true reflection or a false one, every marriage says something about Jesus and his church–then a married life in which the two people, the man and the woman, do the same things over and over, talk about the same things, eat the same food, put on the same clothes, work on the same things, day after day, is a good and holy gift. It says about Jesus, not that he requires adventure and self fulfillment, but that in the ordinary moment by moment life, he is always there, always saying something, always listening. It says about the church that each thing that she does, however hard it may be, is of worth and value, and that she should keep doing it. It says that God is faithful, and that the church is a worthy bride. In a marriage where either person decides the other is not that exciting, and goes off to find some other pavement, some other fridge, some other unfamiliar sky, the lie that is told about God is immense and evil. That God is faithless, that the church has grown old and unworthy.

The gift of the other person, in the ordinary details of life, is a perfect gift, an extra-ordinary gift, a good gift, coming down from the Father in whom there is no shadow or change. So, here's to another thirteen years, and many many more than that, and to all that God will do and be and all that we will become.