Recently Steve and I celebrated our 30th anniversary together as a married couple.
The symbol for 30 years of marriage is a pearl.
I feel this is appropriate because pearls are the only gem in the world formed inside living organisms. Marriages should be alive and over time will produce pearls.
Also, when put in a fire pearls don’t scorch or burn. They hardly even carry the smell of smoke on them after being in a fire. This also speaks to me of marriage, after you have some pearls in your marriage the “fires” of life don’t burn your marriage.
While we in no way have “arrived,” we do perhaps have some perspective.
If you think of marriage and raising kids as an ocean, I feel like we are waist deep.
We have the 30 years of experience relating to each other and we have raised four amazing children. I know enough about marriage and child rearing to know that there is still much to learn. It’s one of those things that the more you know the more you know you can know.
For example, Steve’s mom and dad have 55 years of marriage together and still going strong.
So perspective is good.
Steve and I are not newbies, but we aren’t quite veteran status yet either.
In light of our 30th anniversary we challenged each other to come up with 30 lessons we have learned.
Steve went first and shared out his and we chuckled because some of them were repeats of the same lesson. That is super realistic though. Sometimes we learn the same lesson over and over again, just on different levels of our psyche.
I thought I’d give it a try as well and I will be sharing the lessons I came up with here, one by one, over the next number of weeks.
Experience is life’s best teacher. Learning from your own experience takes time and can be painful. Learning from other people’s experience is much less painful.
My hope and prayer is that our life experience will jive with others and that some of the things we had to learn the hard way, you can learn easier.
We would also invite you to share your experiences with us, so we can learn even more.