Today I’ve been married for fourteen years to a man I’ve been in love with for nearly twenty.

Judging by the length of my hair and nails, this photo was taken Christmas 2000, five years after we started dating, and just a few days before we got married. I was twenty, he was twenty-two.

Life is still like this for us. Still full of joy and laughter. We are rarely at odds. And while I appreciate the sentiment that “marriage is hard work,” I have not found it to be so. That’s not because we’re super special people. We’ve been incredibly blessed in life to avoid some of the tough situations that tend to put couples at odds. But it’s also because we still strive to put one another first, to honor the other above ourselves. And the reason we do that is because the first will be last and the greatest of all is the servant of all. And the times we have quarreled? Usually it amounts to one or both of us being a little self-centered.

We have many challenges ahead of us raising a sweet son who will eventually be a surly teenager who makes some poor choices. We both have dreams we are working toward that may or may not pan out as we’d hoped. There are mounting sorrows the longer you live as people close to you experience financial or marital distress, suffer failing health, and eventually die. But we walk the road of life together, hand in hand, one pulling the other back up onto his or her feet when we stumble, always looking for the path that is laid out for us together rather than focusing solely on our own ambition.

I’m so thankful to have Zachary in my life, and if I try to imagine what my life might have been like without him, it is a dark and lonely place indeed.