Reflection on My Parents' Anniversary

This past Friday would have been my parent’s sixty-seventh wedding anniversary. When they married in 1951, an elder’s nineteen-year-old son and the preacher’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, they promised to stay together until death separated them. They kept that promise until my father died from pancreatic cancer in 2005. Their paths to their wedding had differed. My father’s family had migrated from Tennessee to Indiana when he was a child, seeking better work opportunity during the Depression of the 1930s. His father established his own construction company and build houses. He also helped establish the Central Church of Christ in Muncie, Indiana, sometimes preaching and eventually serving as an elder. My father would gain a brother and two sisters. My mother’s mother died when my mother was three weeks old. She would be reared by her father’s parents and move about every two years as her grandfather, a preacher himself, moved to another congregation, and sometimes another state, to preach. Like her father, she would be an only child. She would attend Christian colleges in Tennessee and Florida before moving to live with her father for the first time at the age of twenty, a move prompted by the opportunity of employment to help her raise money to go back to college. She arrived on a Sunday afternoon and received her first impression of my father, a negative one, that evening when he and some friends walked noisily and late into the evening worship service. He won her heart, however, quite quickly. Among the factors that she liked about him was that he was not a preacher. Ironically, six years later, after two years in the Army and several years working for Kroger, just after my birth two years after the death of my older brother and after the purchase of a house and car, he announced to her that he wanted to go to Freed-Hardeman College to study to be a preacher. They would have two more sons. Dad would preach for forty-eight years. For twenty-five years, they celebrated almost all their wedding anniversaries while working with teenagers at austere Christian campgrounds. My mother’s grandmother would live with us for five years and my parents took in a foster child after I left for college. They served the Lord; they loved their children and the congregations where my father preached. They kept their promise. Their shared faith in Christ made that achievement much easier. Neither was perfect, but people knew that they were Christians because of their love and faithfulness. My prayer is that each of us also may live lives of committed love and service that will inspire others to follow Christ.