Last night my wife and I renewed our wedding vows in front of many, many friends old and new.  1

Today is the first day of our second twenty-five years and my first day with my new vows in place.

New vows?
What did I promise?
This is what I said:

Twenty-five years ago I repeated traditional vows that I hoped to keep:

I, Scott, take you Amy, to be my wife
To have and to hold
From this day forward
For better, or for worse
For richer or for poorer
In sickness and in health
To love and to cherish until we are parted by death
As God is my witness,
I give you my promise

June 13, 1986 

She was way, way out of my league.
She was kind, thoughtful, sweet, talented, listened to me, and she liked me.
As far as I could tell, she loved me.
Oh, and she was HOT!
I was clueless what love entailed, but I knew I wanted to love Amy.
I also knew I didn’t want to live without her.
Not that I couldn’t live without her, but I didn’t want to.
So, on one knee, in the living room of the house she lived in I proposed.
She laughed, thinking I was kidding.
I wasn’t. I had no ring because I didn’t want to choose the wrong one.
Then we embraced.

On our 10th Anniversary we renewed our wedding vows.

In 1997 we renewed our wedding vows — not that we were a mess and needed a restart, but — because ten years into our marriage, we were adults, “grown ups”, who had a better idea what we were doing and we wanted to be positive role models.

During our wedding we repeated vows I don’t recall and hope that we kept.  At our 10th we wrote these vows, planning the keep them.  And, aside from moments of selfishness, my inclinations to be a workaholic, and an occasional crabby day, we’re still keeping them.  These vows help us keep on track toward our goal of a lifelong happy marriage.

To recap, I had lost faith, given up hope and my solutions I chose left me feeling guilty, dirty and foolish.

Any one of my miserable days, lonely nights or stupid decisions could have been life-altering, but it was a conversation with an equally lost friend that changed my life.

My Journey

Fortunately, since I was seven, a guy named Steve Schesvold, cared about me.

Steve invited me to join him in church.

“Love never fails.” These words are two thousand years old and yet they are as important today as they were then.

What is love?  “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails…“  [1 Corinthians 13:4-8]