Random Thoughts on Love and Marriage, by Joan Rowden Hart.
I have performed many weddings since I was first ordained 34 years ago. My first wedding was outside at a resort near the Niangua River. My last was outside at a Lebanon park. I probably will never do another one because of my health problems.
In between I have performed weddings at my home, at other homes, in churches, and even inside the state prison at Farmington. I have always felt that the traditional wedding ceremony and vows were much more profound than most people realized, even the bride and groom.
The promises made to have and to hold, from this day forward; for better, for worse; for richer or for poorer; in sickness and in health; to love and to cherish until separated by death, are not meant to be taken lightly.
My husband and I were married in 1963. Fifty-six years of marriage is not all that unusual now if you will notice as you read the anniversary notices in this newspaper each Saturday. This is the Midwest, the buckle of the Bible belt, as traditional as you can get, and people our age got married in the 50’s and 60’s intending to keep those wedding vows and many of us do if we are blessed to have our spouse with us all those years.
We lived back in the day when courtship came first, then marriage, then children. Our courtship, 99% of which took place at church activities, started in junior high and continued through high school, with marriage coming 2 years after graduation.
So we had a long time to get to know each other. But we found out the first week of marriage there were things you can only discover when you start living in the same house.
The first night in our home, Milan mentioned that I hadn’t turned down the bed covers. I was flabbergasted, and that’s when I realized the difference in how we had been raised.
He is the oldest child of a family of five who had been raised by a stay at home mother whose entire life consisted of meeting the needs of her children, including turning the covers down on the bed each night.
I was a child of divorce, raised by my grandparents who worked hard just to put food on the table, and my sisters and I not only tried to help out as much as we could, but also learned to make do for ourselves. Nobody had waited on us as we were growing up.
Then there was the issue of who always puts the cap back on the toothpaste or who throws it away the first time it is used, never to be seen again. (I am the latter.)
And the question of whether the end of the toilet paper goes over or under the roll. Once you get those issues settled, the rest is pretty easy.
(I often joke that in the 53 years my husband and I have been married, we have never once considered divorce. Murder, yes, but not divorce!)
The wedding vows assume there will be changes in each other during the lifetime of the marriage.
We certainly didn’t expect for me to be called to the ministry 15 years after we wed, but I was more surprised than he was. He has often said he was afraid God would call him to preach and so he prayed that it would be me since our church ordains women to the ministry.
As it turned out he has a greater ministry than I ever did working with children and youth in our church which began even before we were married and continues to this day.
That call to ministry turned out to be more sacrificial for our marriage than we had planned. I moved to Farmington to pastor a church and he stayed here to keep his barbershop open and take care of the house. Every weekend for five years he drove 300 miles round trip to Farmington and served as youth leader while I was pastor there.
Neither did we expect that the vow about sickness would come into play. He has kept that vow by taking care of me and the house by assuming the cooking, laundry, cleaning, and shopping duties, while cutting hair every day and teaching a Sunday School class of teenagers.
We are both homebodies, and we treasure every moment we have in our home together. We enjoy the “stuff” we have accumulated over the years although it drives the rest of our family crazy.
One trip through our cluttered home will tell you what we treasure - his Aladdin lamps, my books, walls full of family pictures, household items that started out as necessities, even wedding gifts, now part of the provenance of the life we established together 53 years ago.
There is no possibility either one of us would ever remarry should something happen to the other because nobody else would be able to adjust to the lifestyle and collections of “antiques and junque” that make it home for us.
To have a successful marriage, you must want that marriage to last more than you want anything else on earth.
Even more important, you must immediately invite Jesus Christ into your marriage and accept His Lordship over your lives.
When God is your foundation, the home and marriage you build will withstand every storm because they are built on the Solid Rock. Like in the little children’s church song, that Rock will stand as the prayers go up and the blessings come down. No winds of adversity can cause your house to fall when it is built on the Rock.
56 years of marriage doesn’t mean we are experts on the subject, just that we have learned how to survive!
You don’t remain the same people. You mature in different ways and at different times and a couple must be careful that as they grow, they don’t grow apart.
But seriously, when you get married that young, there are a lot of changes that take place as the years go by.
You may have noticed that in most marriages the spouses are very different in personalities and habits. That’s because opposites really do attact and if both of you were exactly alike, one of you would be unnecessary.
Those of you who know us know that my husband is very reserved and appreciates his privacy, which I violate when I put stuff like this on Facebook. On the other hand, I love the limelight. I will gladly tell you everything I know, and more besides.
It also helps if you share at least one mutual interest outside your work and family. For us, it is our home. Both of us have always been homebodies but my various career choices meant I had to be gone a lot.
We don’t take vacations or travel because we’ve spent a lifetime accumulating what it takes to make us happy, and we can’t see spending our hard earned money to leave it and go someplace else not nearly as comfortable even for a few days. And we love our stuff. Boy do we love our stuff! Drives our daughter and granddaughters crazy!!
© Joan Rowden Hart
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