60 Years

"Marry your best friend," my grandmother told me last year. "It works best if you do it that way. That's what we did."

My grandparents celebrated 60 years of marriage yesterday. I love that I have grown up with that expectation as the "norm" surrounding me. In a world where so few people make it through life without divorce directly affecting them somehow, I am blessed and thankful to have seen up close what a real marriage looks like. You marry someone for who they are and who you are at the ages of 22 and 23, but you stay married to them for (or sometimes in spite of, or with hope that they will get past) who they are at 35, at 50, at 80. My grandparents have faced the ins and outs of 60 years of life together. They have survived, hand in hand, through times of war and peace, of sickness and health, of bearing three girls and, nearly half a century later, burying one. They have prayed together, gardened together, fished together, and traveled together. They have chosen, every day for nearly 22,000 days, to share life with each other and to honor the commitment they made to each other and to God.

That's what I want. I want, after decades together, after youth has faded and the realities of life have set in, to still go for a walk hand in hand with my husband every Christmas morning. There will be challenges. Anyone is a fool who believes falling in love is all that is required to establish and maintain a family. But I want to find the gold that comes on the other side of refinement. I want to fall in love and then to spend a lifetime choosing love and seeing the fruit of that choice.

Happy anniversary, Grandma and Grandpa!