My girlfriend Sheri sent this video out to a few girls in our office last week and I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit since then.

This young couple about to get married has an incredible opportunity to be made over to see what they might look like at ages 50, 70 and 90.

Can you imagine?

Young, vibrant, excited individuals ready to be married.

Seeing themselves how they might look at these ages, after so many years of marriage.  To ponder on the things they might have experienced together in all of those years.  The trials, the joys…the ups the downs.  The for betters and for worses.  For richer and for poorer.  In sickness and in health.  To love and to cherish from this day forward…

The joys that overcame them in the thinking of what could have happened in all the years from when they said “I do” to when they were sitting there, side by side in their 90’s.  What an incredible gift!

To think about how madly in love you are with your boyfriend/girlfriend at the time when you get engaged and then get married and how you’re so vested in each other….

To get there, that same place when you’re 90 takes undying love and commitment.  A will to hold on to each other and not let go.  To never look at the grass on the other side and for one second think it’s greener in that pasture than where you currently stand.

To know that the green grass, the REALLY green grass gets love and attention by its caretaker…  If you don’t “water” and tend to your own marriage, it, like the brown field dies and withers away…

Valentine’s Day is just a month away, and while I love a good excuse to be silly and do fun things for my loves {Andrew and our kids}, it’s not the only day that I/you should make special for the one that you love.

The couples that are still together at 50, 70 and 90 don’t become ordinary.  They don’t become strangers under the same roof.  They pour into each other.  They remember what it was like when they first fell in love.  They spend time together talking, listening, laughing and loving.  They forgive even when they don’t feel like it.  They don’t give up when times get hard.

I’m reminded of course of 1 Corinthians 13:

“If I speak…but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Who wants to be that or hear that, anyway? “Love is patient, kind, not boastful or proud.  It is not self-seeking{!!!!}, it is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs.  It does not delight in evil…Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails.”

Love isn’t just a feeling.  It’s so much bigger than that. Love is all of the things listed above: kind, patient, protecting, trusting, hoping, persevering…  You are love to your spouse, your kids, your friends and strangers when you are these things.

Of course we will stumble, we will fall and we will fail along the way.  I will lose my temper and act like a maniac at times when I don’t get my way.  But if the majority of the day, weeks, months and years, that I can be these things like patient, trusting and persevering and kind, I win, we win, you win.

Your spouse and your kids will know that they are loved and cherished always.

And Lord willing, I’ll get to see what Andrew will look like when he’s 90.  Those eyebrows…