Blessed are the Peacemakers

Today at church I was asked to do a reading during the song "Let There Be Peace on Earth."  Here's what I wrote.

 He came into the world as Prince of Peace

And called us to be peacemakers,

Said we would be blessed.

And so,

Out beyond the right-doing and wrong-doing

Of all the types of people we are–

Liberals and conservatives,

Rich and poor,

Strong and weak,

Wise and foolish—

Out beyond all our differences

There is a field.

“I’ll meet you there,” the peacemaker says,*

“And there we will walk and talk

And find a way forward.

There we will do the hard work of making peace.

And once we make that peace between us,

Once we build our bridge,

We will BE the peace we seek,

And we will be called Sons and Daughters of God.”

*This quote is based on thoughts from a poet named Rumi.

A Happy Anniversary

On the Friday after Thanksgiving thirty-nine years ago, before there was such a thing as Black Friday, Phil and I got married.  

At church last week, after everyone sang “Happy Anniversary” to us, someone asked Phil how long we had been married.  He answered quickly, “Thirty-nine.  Twenty-five of them happily.”  

“Sounds about right,” I chimed in, and we all had a good laugh.

When I’ve told others about this exchange, a few friends seem a little appalled. Most often people have asked if I know which years were the happy ones and if they were consecutive.  The answers to these questions are we are pretty aware of the years that were the hard ones and which ones were happy, and no, they weren't consecutive.

The truth is Phil and I feel very fortunate to be as happy as we are at this point in our marriage. When we think about being happy for two-thirds of our marriage, we figure we’re ahead of the game, and much more fortunate than a lot of people, whether they stayed together or gave up on it altogether.  

When we took our wedding vows we said, “For better or worse,” and for sure, there’s been a lot of both.  So today begins our fortieth year together, and we spent it with Madeline, laughing and playing.   I expect to add it to the happy side of the marriage ledger.