Valentine's--Belated
It's Valentine's Day...[well, it was when I started to write this, now a week has gone by]. I commend this column from Hannah Bird in the Nauvoo Times.
There was a show whose name I forget about a married couple, and some of the story-screen time was in the therapist's office for their individual sessions. The scene that has stayed with me is one where the wife is talking about how all the focus is on the beginnings, the wedding plans, the blissful embarking on a new joint life. She offers the observation that the beginnings are easy, and marriage is easy at the end. It's the middle that's hard. How much of it is middle, the counselor asks. "It's all middle," was the honest reply.
Rapture and bliss will not be a normal, continuous state. Happy marriages are not between people who are happy every second. True, real love will keep a background, a bedrock, of bliss that doesn't get extinguished through all the 'middle' of a life shared.
For Valentine's Day we had a stake adult dance, which we heard nothing about until less than two weeks before. I was preparing and sorting for a major project, and not only did I not make a special dinner this year, but I had to move him down to the other end of the table because I couldn't get rid of the stacks of photographs that I had been pulling out of boxes. So in other words, for this day to celebrate love, I was moving him farther away from me and feeding him whatever it was I was able to turn up. ( Before we did go dancing and had a good time.) He took it in good grace and understood. Love becomes secure and accommodating. We even got a good picture. I think we still like each other.
The stacks of photos will be gone from the table by dinner tomorrow. More about the marathon, and its results, tomorrow.
And Hannah Bird's comment about fore-ordained as a match? That simply means you chose there before you got here. I don't know how often that happens, but certainly it does. But you always have to choose, and you always have to do the work that needs, whatever your story is. Sometimes what's right isn't the same as what's easy, sometimes we choose unwisely and sometimes we might give up on choices that the Lord will indeed redeem. Only divine direction can give us our individual answers. The guy there in that picture, he's always been the one for me, and we've now had forty years as a good beginning on eternal.
Valentine's Day is done now for this year, but tell someone you love them anyway. They shouldn't have to wait for next year to hear it again. Often.
There was a show whose name I forget about a married couple, and some of the story-screen time was in the therapist's office for their individual sessions. The scene that has stayed with me is one where the wife is talking about how all the focus is on the beginnings, the wedding plans, the blissful embarking on a new joint life. She offers the observation that the beginnings are easy, and marriage is easy at the end. It's the middle that's hard. How much of it is middle, the counselor asks. "It's all middle," was the honest reply.
Rapture and bliss will not be a normal, continuous state. Happy marriages are not between people who are happy every second. True, real love will keep a background, a bedrock, of bliss that doesn't get extinguished through all the 'middle' of a life shared.
For Valentine's Day we had a stake adult dance, which we heard nothing about until less than two weeks before. I was preparing and sorting for a major project, and not only did I not make a special dinner this year, but I had to move him down to the other end of the table because I couldn't get rid of the stacks of photographs that I had been pulling out of boxes. So in other words, for this day to celebrate love, I was moving him farther away from me and feeding him whatever it was I was able to turn up. ( Before we did go dancing and had a good time.) He took it in good grace and understood. Love becomes secure and accommodating. We even got a good picture. I think we still like each other.
The stacks of photos will be gone from the table by dinner tomorrow. More about the marathon, and its results, tomorrow.
And Hannah Bird's comment about fore-ordained as a match? That simply means you chose there before you got here. I don't know how often that happens, but certainly it does. But you always have to choose, and you always have to do the work that needs, whatever your story is. Sometimes what's right isn't the same as what's easy, sometimes we choose unwisely and sometimes we might give up on choices that the Lord will indeed redeem. Only divine direction can give us our individual answers. The guy there in that picture, he's always been the one for me, and we've now had forty years as a good beginning on eternal.
Valentine's Day is done now for this year, but tell someone you love them anyway. They shouldn't have to wait for next year to hear it again. Often.
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