Last Sunday I visited my grandmother. We walked around her quaint southern California neighborhood, full of blooming flowers and lovely neighbors walking dogs and wearing wide-brimmed hats.
A golf cart cruised past us. I gazed after the silver heads of the man and woman in it as they sped away.
In just a bit of time, if God is gracious to let us live on through these years, we will be the ones in that golf cart.
I know that’s true because of my wedding photos.
Mr. Fantastic and I got married at the very end of the film era of photography, when digital cameras were new on the horizon and no real photographers used them.
No discs of images, no digital filters, no fancy photo books like people get today; we have a bulky album of real photographs.
Things change. We are beginning to look very different compared to our young wedding day selves.
I consider the lines in our faces and the grace in our souls and I know it is all as it is meant to be.
We have woken up and put one foot in front of the other, trusted God to provide, placed love and obedience as our highest aims, and here we are twelve years later.
The day I wore white and vowed to love him forever, I had no inkling of all the changes and challenges we would face over the next twelve years. I could not have known who I would become.
Likewise, I don’t know who I will be when I step out of bed and make a pot of coffee thirty years from now. But if history is any indicator, I will be a wiser, more gracious version of the girl I once was.
Sometimes I think we celebrate youth a little too much, and push maturity a little too much to the side.
New beginnings are exciting, but the satisfaction of years lived well is a reward that no one told me about. I am learning to wear my life the way I wore a bridal gown once, with joy overflowing and my heart wide open.
Besides, golf carts are fun to drive and I can’t wait….
