Only God!

25 years of marriage today! Really?!  Marriage is never really easy. I mean you take 2 people from two different households with their own way of doing things..such as holiday traditions, birthday celebrations and the like. Toss them under the same roof and that is bound to make for some serious fireworks! I remember the shock on the first Thanksgiving we celebrated with Tom's family 5 months into our marriage. We went to his grandparents house in Morro Bay.  Grandma Byrd!! A lovely spry (sassy!) lady! But what I wasn't prepared for was the different dishes they ate. It never occurred to me that different families ate different things than we did! For instance pretty much every year we went to Bob and Dot's house for Thanksgiving, a typical menu was turkey(or course!),mashed potatoes,stuffing,corn,green salad, cranberry sauce & rolls. Dessert....pies, homemade by my favorite Aunt in the world! (she was sassy too!) Aunt Dot loved to spoil and dote on her family and if you were a favorite (and I was!) she would make your favorite pie....all yours. Some years she would bake up to 18 pies...an amazing woman!!Anyway.....At Grandma Byrd's house the fair was the same.....mostly! Honestly I can't recall everything about that menu...only one thing in particular sticks out. There was this molded jello dish (complete on a bed of lettuce!) it was yellow jello, with large chunks of fruit in it.**insert"Oh no you didnt just serve jello"** Now you must understand this was the most horrid site I could imagine! Not that it wasn't perfect for their dinner, and I am sure it was yummy, and probably made with as much TLC as Aunt Dot's pies, but I hate....hate....hate jello. Can't even eat a bite of it. The taste & texture kill me. Add that with chunks of fruit. Wooo...boy! Anyway I just wanted to go "home", now understand. The Tefft family is loving,accepting,kind,fun and a lovely family and I am more than blessed that I married into their clan. BUT I was just barely 20, and had never celebrated a holiday with any other than my family.....and they served Jello!!!! That was just a small thing compared to some of the other things we would face! Really it was nothing, but it is the way marriage is. Different ideas and thoughts coming together. Learning to love and accept and even embrace each others differences. Learning to speak the truth in love, when there is something that needs to change. Learning to put each others needs before your own. Putting Christ first, seeing the other as Christ sees them. None of those are easy. But I have never read anything that has said "life will be easy". Most people know our early yeas of marriage had been rough, not unlike a lot of marriages. But one thing I am certain of, while I didn't wish to walk down the road we have walked, I know that where we are today. The way I love, the way he loves me. The depth of it, simply couldn't exist if we hadn't come from such a hard place. Remembering the hard times and choosing to stay together through that, has made this time of our lives that much sweeter! I cannot help but be thankful to the friends &  family who prayed for us all these years. They choose to trust God with our marriage, and asked Him to restore & heal. They encouraged us to stay the course, rather than say "they will never make it", "go ahead and leave"....and there certainly were plenty of doubters. Perhaps you are reading this and you were one. I am here to say that our marriage is truly a living testimony to the work that only God can do. If it would have been left up to us, it never would have worked. But God got a hold of each of us, we allowed Him to change us, and here we are 25 years! To God alone be the Glory!!