50 and climbing, December 31st, 2025. So today marks the occasion of our 50th wedding anniversary.

50 years ago on New Year's Eve, Nancy and I exchanged vows, and what a good run it has been.

Considering this on a day like today, it seems impossible

to me to write about anything else. Why would I even want to? Other topics can wait. The perennial

and relevant task of telling my more austere critics that their severities may rhyme with verities,

but that they are not the same thing is more or less a constant. So that can easily wait for another day. Certain anniversaries are weighty, and this would be one of them, obviously. It is not as though you can mark everything, though. The 50th anniversary the first time I kissed her went by unnoticed. That was a few months ago. I mentioned yesterday that when we got married in 1975, America was coming up on her 200th birthday the following July.

Now, as we celebrate our 50th, America is gearing up to celebrate her 250th.

If you do the math quickly, you will see that we have been married for one fifth of the time that an independent America has existed.

Nancy said that this makes us old, but I countered

with another possibility. America is still young, we have time to pull it out. I joined the Navy

right out of high school, and so it's not surprising that being unmarried had seemed normal to me.

But as time went on, it started to seem less and less normal. And as the end of my hitch was

approaching, I had started

to feel the press of reality calling to me. I need to be married. I was starting to feel stretched thin.

One time in passing, my mother had said to me that she didn't mind what kind of girl I brought home

so long as it was a girl like Nancy Greensides. It was just a passing comment, but I did remember it.

Nancy had been converted while a student here at the University of Idaho and had been folded into the small

Christian community here in Moscow. She then graduated with a degree in English-Lid and was offered

a position in several local ministries, part-time with InterVarsity and part-time with Crossroads

Bookstore. Crossroads was an evangelistic literature ministry run by my father.

I came home on leave that summer with just a year left in the Navy,

and Nancy had driven down from Cordillane, where her folks lived,

...