When Trish and I made our marriage vows, neither one of us knew what those vows would eventually require. Young people seldom do. We promise to remain together in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. Those words are familiar. Perhaps too familiar. It is easy to hear them during a wedding without understanding what they may someday mean. Then someday comes. Trish suffered a major stroke. And our life changed.
A Different Marriage
There had been dancing. There had been tennis. There had been traveling. There had been the freedom to get up and go somewhere simply because we wanted to. Now there were limitations. The woman I loved was still there. But the life we had known together was changing. For approximately the last ten years of our marriage, our physical relationship was also no longer what it had once been. That mattered. Marriage includes physical love, and ours had been a beautiful part of the life we shared.
But when that part of our marriage was taken from us, the marriage remained. That taught me something about love. Love is not proved only when two people are young, healthy, and able to give each other everything they desire. Sometimes love is proved by what remains when those things are no longer possible.
The Promise
This is where my understanding of marriage became much deeper. Trish and I had not merely made promises to each other. We had made them before God. That mattered when marriage became difficult. It mattered when circumstances changed. It mattered when our lives were no longer what we had expected them to be. A wedding vow is easy to repeat. Living it can be something else entirely. I had been through two divorces. I knew what it was like for a marriage to end while both people were still alive.
This marriage was different. Trish and I stayed. Not because every day was easy. Not because nothing had changed. We stayed because the covenant had not changed. The test did not destroy our marriage. In some ways, it revealed what the marriage had been built upon.