To Have and To Hold

 

    Tonight my family and I join in discernment, sending our prayers, positive thoughts and vibes to our brother-in-law, Joe, along with my sister, Helen, as he  prepares for a life-saing surgery tomorrow.  When you think of Helen, you automatically think of Joe. It is almost like their names run together because rarely do you say one name without the other.  Helen’n’Joe. Just like that, all in one breath. 

    I'll bet if you’d ask, they’d say that they knew on the night they met at the Pumpkin Tree it was forever. One of the gifts of youth, I think, is that it exposes you to unbridled possibilities in life and shelters you from the caustic realities at the same time. Like most of us who married super young, Helen and Joe were full of hope and anticipation of their newly emerging life together and were eager to get started not realizing the challenges from which nobody is spared. Today, more than 40 years later, facing possibly their biggest trail, they're still holding strong together. He is the love of her life and she is his.

    “To have and to hold from this day forward” is a phrase included in many marriage vows and so common that it’s often expected. If I am being honest, I never paused to think about what those words meant, beyond the obvious, and probably should have given that we included them in our own vows. I get the gist and the general idea that by saying those words, you promise to stick it out through all the hard stuff. But I never thought deeply about what that phrase means specifically or in practice. So to do that, I reflected on Helen’n’Joe’s long-haul marriage to offer some insight as to what ‘having and holding’ looks like in real life.  I wrote this for them.

                        

To Have and To Hold

     ~a love story

To have dreams and ideas of how life could be.

To hold firm when all seems impossible and unfair.

To have faith in God and values that reflect.

To hold true when the world gets heavy and thick.

To have fun and adventures and reasons to laugh.

To hold on through deep sorrow and loss.

To have courage, to dream and risk the unknown.

To hold strong through disappointments and rejection.

    

To have contentment and joy in the life that you built.

To hold steady through the mundane and routine.

To have compassion and patience when it's needed the most.

To hold together when one requires more.

To have time to grow up and space grow old.

To hold on to the promise of forever.