#44

Today we celebrate forty-four years of marriage. Forty-four years of traveling this life together as best friends, lovers and co-workers trying to make a positive difference in this world.

We were so young on that 1977 August day! We were so confident that we could change the world for the better. This desire to make a difference fueled many of the choices we made and served us well. But it was also naive. We didn’t know then, that being a difference might be just as important or perhaps even more important than trying to make a difference.

This shift in our perception was noticeably present in the love letter project we completed this past winter.

It took us 44 years to finally re-open the two shoe-boxes filled with 1976-1977 love letters and cassette tapes we sent each other during the college summers of our courtship (while Lloyd was in BC and Vicki in WI). These boxes traveled with us when we moved from Racine WI, to Sioux Center IA, to Des Moines IA and most recently to Maple City MI. We secured the boxes with rubber bands and kept them on the top bedroom shelf of the nine different homes we lived in throughout these moves. They collected dust and even began to disintegrate as we lived the busy days of our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s and early 60s. This past winter, in the middle of a global pandemic, there was finally time to re-visit our courtship correspondence.

Winter 2020 provided many quiet evenings to build a fire and read the letters aloud to each other. When it came time for the cassette tapes, we converted them to flash drive format because cassette players were no longer available. Listening to our wedding ceremony (this particular cassette tape had also been stashed in one of the love letter shoeboxes) was particularly poignant.

The whole process took several months and we were brought to wonderful tears more than once. We took our time over the course of the winter because we  wanted to slowly savor the experience.

After revisiting this correspondence,  it was clear that our basic personalities have remained the same: Lloyd is still a deductive thinker, a planner, a cognitive big-picture common-sense person and Vicki is still an inductive thinker, a creative, detail oriented, follow your heart person.  Although our differences can clash at times, we generally compliment each other in good ways. Our opposite qualities do not negate each other. Instead, they cohabitate and co-create in mysterious unity that even we don’t understand. Because we’re so different from each other we have more to offer together than apart.

It was also clear from our early correspondence,  that we really did want to change the world.

Here’s an excerpt from a 1976 letter I wrote to Lloyd:

“I just pray that our fire will grow from sparks, into a blazing flame together, in which our lives bring God’s love and light into this world, and we truly magnify the Son together. I am just so confident that this will happen in our marriage if we can continuously keep each other on our toes, if you know what I mean.”

We sincerely hope of course, that the activities we’re currently involved in will make a positive difference, but we’re no longer so sure we can change the world. We’re not as results-focused. We find comfort in these words:

“Do not depend on the hope of results…you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no results at all, if not perhaps, results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.” (Thomas Merton)

Now, instead of working for results (we still at least hope for them), we are more focused on being faithful to our own process in whatever work it is that we pursue, in whatever situations we encounter.  The question has shifted from how can I make a difference to how can I be a difference.  How can I be a person who listens to what moves me, in order to discern what I am called to do in any given decision or moment of time?’

Should I say yes to this request or that request? Reach out to this particular person or that person? How do I know my next right step regardless of whether or not I think it will actually change the world for the better?  How can I find the courage to take this step even even in the face of what seems to be insurmountable evil? How can I be present, loving and kind in this situation or that situation? How can I be faithful to my gifts, to the needs I see around me, and to the ways I engage those needs with my gifts?

We’re not so sure of where, when of if we effect change. We trust though, that despite our many flaws, the offerings we’ve made and are still making, will leave the world a slightly better place. We trust this world will  indeed change for the better the more we can  keep each other on our toes if you know what I mean, about staying on this path of being faithful to the process. We trust that change will be a byproduct of faithful presence rather than a result of our own efforts.

Our love letters and cassette tapes are still stored in our current bedroom closet. The old shoeboxes have been discarded and replaced with sturdy wooden boxes.

Please celebrate this day with us. We know it is a gift, that it does not belong to us, that it belongs to us all.

Do not be dismayed at the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you. (L.R. Knost)