“Can you believe it’s been forty years?” I asked Mike.

“Yes and no.” He answered. “It seems like yesterday and like a long time ago all at the same time.”

“When you’ve been married this long, people wonder what the secret is. People ask me that now? So what do you think it is – the secret to making it?”

My husband said exactly what I’ve been thinking lately, “There’s no big secret. It’s hard work and a lot of showing up and not giving up”

Our son, David, recently wrote a great song to his wife, Clara, for their fourth wedding anniversary titled, “Ornery Love”. You can listen to it here.

The word ornery doesn’t typically have a positive connotation but one definition is, stubborn. I like the idea of using it to describe a long lasting marriage because an obstinate commitment to each other is what it takes to keep a marriage alive and growing in a culture that does everything possible to slaughter it.

I’m thrilled our son and his wife are discovering this early on and hope both sets of parents, his and hers, have modeled ornery love well enough to be certain our kids will take the marriage journey from four anniversaries to forty and beyond, as we are doing now.

We’ve done an incredible amount of ornery loving through our years of togetherness and by a miracle of God’s grace we’ve never quit.

August 23, 1975 – 2015! Happy, Ornery #40 to us.

1 Corinthians 13:7 “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.”