Forty Years of Wedded Bliss

The last couple of years in the nineties brought several challenges our way and marked a special event in our lives.  

• ·        We completed our relationship with the Pan American Lectureship.  Our last trip was to the Dominican Republic.  In some ways I found it quite disturbing.  We were comfortably settled in a five star hotel with a beautiful view of the Caribbean Sea, but we came in right after a hurricane, and if I looked to the street level I saw terrible poverty and devastation.  It was hard to enjoy the luxury.  My colleagues gave me a commemorative clock as a “going away” gift, then they all threatened to resign so they could get a clock.

• ·        We had health challenges.  There were two or three hospitalizations.  We couldn’t get insurance, and we weren’t old enough for Medicare.  It made us look forward to turning 65.

• ·        Eddie left us in 1998, and I took on my first job description change.  I became the interim “go to guy.”  I would take on that job two more times before leaving Southern Hills.

• ·        Elliott, Melanie, Hunter, and Audrey came back from Germany and Elliott began his second tour of duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

• ·        Gary introduced us to Kelly and Scott, who have been part of our lives ever since.

• ·        We held “Mending a Messed Up Marriage” workshops at various locations and completed a “Certification in Family Ministry” program at Oklahoma Christian University.

• ·        In December we observed our fortieth anniversary, but we celebrated before that.  The whole family gathered at Fort Leavenworth.   We had a family photo taken at the Tom Custer house.   Tom Custer was the brother of the famous George Armstrong Custer.

• I’ve described our first forty years of marriage as years of wedded bliss.  That’s a little bit of an exaggeration.  Make no mistake about it, we’ve had a wonderful ride, and it has not been boring.  Sometimes I would jokingly say that we had been happily married for more than twenty years.  Of course we had actually been married forty years, but my tongue-in-cheek statement was not much of an exaggeration.  It really took us about 16 years to figure out how this marriage thing is supposed to work.