Wait, what?

These were the looks on our faces 20 years ago, about an hour after we’d made our marriage vows in Montreat Chapel. We were both 21 years old and this snapshot is a decent representation of at least a part of what we were feeling that day: Wait, we’re actually married? OK… and now what?

Actually, all these years later, this is probably still a good visual of my experience of marriage much of the time. Wait, what?!

What I mean is that there’s nothing static about marriage. I’m not the same person as the guy in that photo who’s wearing those J.C. Penney pleated slacks and trying to act like he knows what’s going on. Thankfully I’m not. Neither is Maggie.

In hindsight, it’s a strange thing to think of all of the build-up and planning for our wedding, though I don’t regret any of it. It highlighted the significance and permanence of our vows. It’s as though the occasion itself was an answer to the reasonable questions, Really? Till death do you part? Are you sure?

The thing we didn’t know, not really, and which was maybe foreshadowed in our deer-in-the-headlights expressions, was how regularly we’d need to answer those same questions again. In some ways marriage is simply one year after another of making the same vows – as a different person than the one you were the year before, to a person who’s a little – or a lot – different than the one you made promises to in previous years.

People sometimes laugh when they see our wedding pictures. How old were you, 16? But here’s the gift of having been married for half our lives: I’ve had the chance to grow to love the many stages of the same woman. That’s the impossible and wonderful thing that we could only barely imagine on that warm North Carolina night 20 years ago.

I can imagine a tradition in which each anniversary the same people gathered, along with new ones picked up along the way, to witness the same two people make the same vows. The vows would remain the same; the wife and her husband, now differently constituted and configured, would be the changed parts of the annual ceremony. In this alternative universe we’d all recognize that no person should remain the same, that change is evidence of life even when the changes are frightening and surprising. We’d affirm the grace that holds together this couple who, on any given anniversary, is becoming acquainted with the person they’ve each become.

If I could whisper anything to those two as we prepared to cut the cake it’d be something like this: Relax. You don’t have to know what you’re doing. Enjoy each other today for who you are. And hold each other loosely so that you’ll be ready for who you’ll each become.

Happy anniversary Maggie. I can’t wait to see who we’ll be in the next 20 years.