The Last Waltz 9/1/2017

Good Morning,

Friday stepped up to the plate and hit it right out of the park. I just poured a cup of Door County Jamaican Blue Mountain Blend Coffee, tossed down a few grapes, finished my prayer time and now it's time to write.

Ruth 1:16-17: “Entreat me not to leave you, Or to turn back from following after you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, And your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, And there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, If anything but death parts you and me."

For some strange reason I was recalling the reception at our wedding in 1986. Don't ask me why, but it was part of my traffic jam day dreaming on my way home last night. I recalled the bridal dance for Rene and I. It was a waltz to a song that contained these lyrics. "Could I have this dance for the rest of my life"? Both of us still like to hear that song and it always brings us back to that night. We have danced to many more waltzes over the years and there will probably be some more to come. But for us that wedding night waltz was really the last waltz and it was meant to last forever.

Rene and I both knew then how God worked to put us together and that what He did was to last forever. As we get older we can see how God used a recession to have us meet. He used an employment snaffoo to get me to the same department as Rene in a hospital where I never in a million years thought I would be working in. He used common interests ( baseball and strawberries) to start a friendship. He helped us both develop a love for Jesus Christ and one another. He gave us both the desire to be married and share our lives with each other.

As with many wannabe dancers our lives have had a few times when the life dance was out of synch and toes got stepped on. But none of those times ever caused us to want to stop the waltz of marriage.

Neither one of us ever takes ourselves too seriously and will often give in to the other out of love and respect. Our love for God helps us to keep waltzing in life even when the dance is difficult. We both said to each other while we were single that we wanted to remove the word divorce from our vocabulary. It is disturbing to us as to how many young couples have an exit strategy for their marriage if it isn't what they wanted. The first sign of an exit strategy is when couples have separate bills and separate bank accounts. "Each to their own". Then with separate accounts it becomes mine and yours. It's the simple things that we do, without knowing that we have developed an exit strategy.
The other thing people do is to refer to their home as "My house, my home" instead of our house or our home. A home is not just a building but the people inside who make a house a home.

So this concludes with a statement. If you want to make your spouse feel insecure start with separate finances, and always say "my home, my kids or look what I did for us". Those statements start the music to sour and create a gap in any marriage.

Dance on.

Marty