Marriage

How does one celebrate twenty-five years of marriage? It’s not as if that particular milestone on one’s marital journey is innately distinct from the year before or the one hopefully to follow. Yet our culture nods sternly toward the expectation that any couple who has made it this far, and is not in the midst of divorce proceedings, ought to do something special to mark the achievement.

Reprinted with permission from Baptist Bulletin Mar/Apr 2013. All rights reserved. Read Part 1.

I know of a man who met his wife in a most unusual way. One day he was making a run for his job as a cleaning supplies salesman when he passed by a house that caught his attention—actually, it was the mailbox that caught his eye. It bore the phrase, “Jesus—the Way, Truth, Life.” He was intrigued, and on impulse, he stopped and stuck his business card in the door.

“I thought that a family lived there,” he later said. As a man in his late 20s with an evangelistic bent, he was aware that sometimes people present as Christians who, in fact, are not, and he wanted to meet the family who owned the home and find out where they stood spiritually.

But instead of hearing from a family, he received a call from the young woman who owned the home—a nurse who worked the night shift. After chatting by phone and enjoying the conversation, he expressed an interest in getting to know her better, but she said he would have to meet her family first. So she suggested they meet for a Sunday service at the Baptist church her family attended. He stopped by the church, and the rest, as they say, is history. The couple hit it off, the family approved, and three years later they’re happily married and living in the house with the legendary mailbox!