One of my favourite “people-I-don’t-know-personally” is Scot McKnight (which lots of you will have picked up on already). He’s guest-posted over at Out of Ur, on staying married. It’s a beautiful read, and I was struck particularly by this quote:
One pragmatic argument on which I have reflected is the value of memory. Kris and I have been married for thirty-five years. We grew up in the same community; our fathers coached together; we were boyfriend and girlfriend in grade school and junior high. We got serious as sophomores in high school and got married as sophomores in college. (Not what we recommended for our two kids.)
Here’s my point: nearly everything about each of our lives is known to the other. Furthermore, in our daily conversations, we draw on our collective memory of our thirty-five years of life together, and it is now rare that one of us says something about the past that the other one doesn’t already know. Our stories are reminders, not revelations, of our past together. They glue our stories into one story. Admittedly, that we grew up together gives our collective memory a dimension that most don’t know, but my point is not so much about marrying someone from your hometown as staying married.
I’ve been thinking about the whole marriage thing a bit recently, partly because wifey has posted on it, and partly because I’ve been stressed lately with a few (good and bad) things going on – and as a result I’ve ended up acting like a jerk to my wife some of the time. And as a result of that I’ve made an effort to do some good things as well. But as the deep romantic that I am, I’m absolutely struck by the vision of life in the whole post. Obviously, having been married for the past 18 months, Rebecca and I are at a much earlier point in the journey than Scot and Kris, but the heart is still the same.
I am such a lucky man.
