The Marvelous Miracle of Messy

Look at these two cuties, would you?

The date was June 2, 1955. Seventy years ago, these two young pups went into the Salt Lake Temple as individuals and came out as an eternal family.

This photograph shows them at the threshold of their honeymoon cottage just a few hours after their wedding. Aren't they adorable?

They're my parents.

Mom and Dad wrote letters to each other while Dad was in Korea; they fell in love in those letters. Dad bought Mom china at the Noritake factory in Japan on the way home before he'd even asked her to marry him.

She's said it's the china she would have picked if she were with him. It had pink roses; the only thing she requested for her funeral was that her casket be covered with pink roses.

Dad's been gone nearly three years; Mom joined him early last year. As I've thought about their anniversary today, I've thought about the important lessons I've learned from growing up with them as my parents.

Both had firm witnesses of the reality of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Both served well, in completely different ways. Both worked hard, in completely different ways. Both studied deeply, in completely different ways. Their differences complimented each other; they didn't think alike AT. ALL. But they learned to think together.

Both wanted a home where people felt welcome, and they created it, in spades. I watched anyone who came to our house welcomed and invited in. I learned there is no circle on earth that can't be made bigger so no one ever feels left out.

Ours was the Kool-Aid house, and at any given time, literally anything could be going on:

• driveway basketball games, backyard baseball or football games, or out in the street kickball games

  
  

• needing every piece of construction paper in the house for a one-issue run of a "neighborhood newspaper"

  
  

• teaching our friends - Lutherans, and what great sports - "Come, Come Ye Saints" - for a July 24 "pageant" on our patio as the stage

  
  

• "Ennie-ay-Over" - and who even knows how to spell that? - a game where one team in the front yard throws a softball up across the house, to the waiting team in the back yard. You warn the other team the ball is coming by shouting "Ennie-ay-Over" as the ball is thrown. This continues like volleyball - with the house being the net - until someone is able to actually catch the ball. Suddenly it's a brutal game of surprise tag, where the team who caught the ball rushes around the house to catch the other team unawares - expanding their team by keeping any opposing team members they can pelt with the ball they caught.

Our parents were such good sports. They took all our childhood machinations in stride, and aided and abetted in many. With Dad being a school teacher, we didn't have a lot, but we always had enough - and plenty for my parents to make a lot of magic for us.

It wasn't always perfectly harmonious and happy. We didn't always get along, or even like each other very much. But Mom and Dad modeled beautifully what keeping covenants looks like in the messiness of everyday living: you get up the next day and try again.

The children left home, the parents learned who each other were again, and realized they loved each other in new ways. They continued to gather us and our families home for a monthly Sunday dinner, a tradition which continues after their departure.

As the aging process accelerated, covenant keeping was even more starkly beautiful - through serious surgeries, chronic pain, loss of mobility and eyesight, and then having to let one go on ahead, leaving the other behind for a time.

There is so much more power to hanging on than we know. When the only thing that matters is the only thing that's left, my parents still had each other, and their covenants. After any randomly difficult day which might have included tension or tears, the next day, one felt her way towards the other with very little eyesight left; the other stepped carefully toward her with a walker to keep his balance.

In 67 years of living together, they adored each other in all their brilliant, hysterical, vexing, maddening, marvelous messiness.

Because they love Jesus Christ even more than each other, their lives were their offering to Him till the day they died. They offered it up every morning because their covenants clearly stated they weren't going anywhere, in spite of the mess.

The covenant said they wouldn't let go.

Tennyson describes the loss of aging perfectly:

"Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

(Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King)

With so much stripped away physically - that firm resolve to not let go of Him - or each other - was all they had left, and Jesus Christ has always promised that that is enough. Jesus turns the ordinary into sacred - the mess into a marvelous miracle of sealing.

Because they wouldn't let go.

Happy heavenly anniversary, Mom and Dad. I miss you like the dickens. Thank you for teaching me to serve and work, to never leave anyone out, to try again every day, and to never let go of the Savior.

These two cuties? Exhibit A of what messy covenant keeping looks like. Isn't it beautiful?

P.S. The difference between adorable in 1955 and beautiful in 2020? Sanctification.