I sent an R.S.V.P. to a young couple letting them know that my bride and I would be attending their wedding which is coming up in a couple of weeks. The really interesting thing about this wedding is that the young lady who will become the bride is one of the kids that grew up with my oldest son Micah. They attended church together and have been really good friends for as long as I can remember. And then I read a comic this morning too, which set my mind to thinking about marriage and beginnings. I've been around the block a few times in my almost 50 years on planet Earth, and one of the things I have noticed is how many kids getting married want to have the things that their parents have, the day after the honeymoon is over.
There is a scene from the John Wayne movie Mclintock that I love, and what the Duke says in it pretty well gets at the heart of what I'm trying to say this morning. GW is talking to his daughter Becky about marriage, and says:
"What I'm gonna give you is a 500 cow spread on the upper Green River. While that might not seem like much, that's more than we had, your mother and I. Some folks are gonna say I'm doing this all so I can sit up in the hereafter and look down on a park named after me. Or that I was disappointed in you, didn't want you to get all that money. But the real reason, Becky, is because I love you, and I want you and some young man to have what I had. Because all the gold in the United States Treasury and all the harp music in Heaven can't equal what happens between a man and a woman, with all that growing together."And "growing together" is what marriage is all about. I think it is during that time of struggling together that you come to grow and appreciate what you have later on in life. Marriage is not about the end result at the beginning, it is about building a life together. To build something means that you are going to have to work, and that is where so many marriages fail. Young couples go into marriage full of the "in love" feelings, which make it easy for a time. But then when bills start to pile up, and decisions about what to do start to arrive, too many couples head for the hills instead of sticking it out and growing together.
My bride and I didn't have two nickels to rub together and we lived on very little when we first got married. Actually for one solid year I ate bologna sandwiches for lunch every day. On a good week, (when we had some extra cash) I had some mustard to put on the bread, and a bag of chips to go with it. To this day, I will not eat bologna unless it is the absolute last possible thing to eat, because I ate so much of the stuff that to think about it turns my stomach. The only way we had any entertainment for several years was because I worked at a video rental store, and anything that wasn't rented when I closed up for the night I could take home for free and watch. We were poor.
I thank God for those times early on in our marriage though, and I am very appreciative to all of those people who helped us out in the early days. One thing I would not trade for anything, is those days when Cheryl and I were getting to know each other and learning how to live together. I won't lie, there were times when it was rough and neither one of us liked each other very much, but we stuck it out and grew together in our relationship.
This is where I think so many couples miss out. They are so busy trying to get the "stuff" thinking that will make their marriage great, and they actually miss out on finding out who they married. And believe me, if you are dating someone and think that you know them, wait until you've been married a few years. My bride and I will celebrate 24 years this August and we're still learning things about each other, and getting the opportunity to build our marriage.
I feel that while we didn't really enjoy the time in our "humble beginnings", those were some of the best times in our life together as husband and wife. I mean yeah we've got better stuff now than we had back then, but it's not about the stuff, it's about the relationship and that doesn't take amazing stuff, that just takes time and a willingness to grow together.
