daily java

Daily Java:

Let your wife be a fountain of blessing for you. Rejoice in the wife of your youth. (Proverbs 5:18)

Ella had her birthday this past week. It was the annual observance of her 39th birthday. We hold the  observance (obviously since it is called annual) every year. And every year it surprises me.

When I was a young preacher, I went to visit with an old couple. He was still in command of most of his faculties, but she was obviously mentally out of the loop. She was deep in the throes of what we called at the time senility, but probably what we would call Alzheimer’s today.

He and I were sitting in the living room talking. She was just sitting staring. She was obviously gone mentally. But as we talked, he looked at her and mentioned the fact that to him she looked the same. They had been married a long time and she didn’t look all that different to him.

My thought was that the old geezer had slipped several cogs. She was a drooling old woman sitting staring vacantly at the coffee table. I was, you remember, a 26 year old young man, with little or no perspective of my own.

Ella is having problems in her life. She has trouble doing many of the things she used to do so easily. She has also had several celebrations of her 39th birthday by now. She has to ride a scooter and takes about 7/8ths of a pound of drugs a day to deal with the constant pain brought on by her MS.

Yet – and here is the amazing revelation that I have almost forty years later – when I look at her, I do not really notice that. It is not that I sit and stare at an older woman all day thinking, boy howdy, she has changed. The change has been so gradual that I only notice it once in a while, usually when I look at an older picture. She really does not look all that different to me.

I will have to admit, she has changed physically less than many women I have known. I know. General stuff has changed, but she still has the same quality of look that she has always had. I still remember the 17 year old girl in the bowling alley after the big youth rally in Houston. I still remember the girl I proposed to. I still remember our wedding day. I still remember all of the stuff that came since.

When I look at her, I do not see her with the eyes of today, but with the eyes of an almost 42 year old marriage. I have known her since 1969 and since we have gotten married, have seen her every day. I have kissed her over 50,000 times, probably more. We have been through so much.

But we went through it all in a day by day relationship. It is not like we only see each other once a week or once a month. It still amazes me to see my Facebook friends I went to high school with. There was a forty year gap from the last time I saw them and they are different. I would not have recognized them if I had met them on the street.

But I have to admit that Ella has changed less than many I know. Her basic quality was always sweet and still is. She has shifted in size and stuff in the past forty some odd years, but who hasn’t? She still looks the same to me.

And I am glad. I would hate to look at a woman every day and think, wow, she has gotten old. Of course, she would be thinking the same thing about me. I am not the tall, strong, vibrant guy I was either. In fact, in spite of her illness, she has worn a lot better than I have.

I just want to sit with her on the couch while a self-important little preacher comes to see me and to tell him the same thing. She looks the same to me.