If life goes in waves, mine are rolling in faster and higher. In fact, I’m a bit seasick.
Weren’t we just children whom someone else worried about? Then college students, totally independent except for our parents’ money? Fast forward to marriage, careers, and kids of our own to worry about.
Weddings now fill the horizon as friends of our 20-something kids begin echoing “I do’s.”
My husband and I drove to Augusta this year to attend the wedding of the daughter of dear friends. It’s where we began life as newlyweds more than three decades ago. I couldn’t stop humming “Sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the years.” He couldn’t stop rolling his eyes.
I flashed back to three young couples who met in Augusta: the parents of the bride, my husband and me, and one other couple. We connected as the rebels who didn’t follow the Young Marrieds Sunday School script. We played hooky from the potlucks, stayed up late playing “Nertz,” and dug deep into each other’s lives and struggles. Within three years, we all dispersed: the bride’s parents moved to Israel to run a youth hostel, the other couple transferred “up North” and began to populate the earth with boys, and we lived in Michigan and Montana before coming back to the South. Those two couples rooted back in Augusta, and we settled in Birmingham. But before our small group broke up, we left each other with a promise that turned out to be profound. We decided to simply pray for each others’ marriages. Looking back, there’s no better advice I could give these young wedding-bound women.
I was asked to speak to Elizabeth and her bridesmaids at their pre-wedding brunch. As I began, I saw the same look in these girls’ eyes that I had 30+ years earlier. A naïve determination that they’d be different, they’d get it right, because they’re more energetic, more creative, more in love.
More at: Marriage Can Be Stormy by Nancy Carroll
The Good News 