A Love That Lasts

One day the door bell rang so I opened the door and a lady who is a neighbor of ours pushed a small girl into the foyer and asked if she could stay here for a few minutes. It wasn’t long until the door bell rang again and this time it was a young man standing at the front door and instructing his daughter to come out to him. I really did not know at the time what was going on but here I was right in the middle of things I soon detected as being a real family problem. The neighbor who brought the child to our house was only trying to help but the father was wanting his daughter so I had no alternative in the matter but to have the child leave our house.

I watched the activities across the street at the house where the girl and her mother were staying with the child’s grandparents. A few days later the grandfather came to visit me and explained that his daughter and her husband were in the process of getting a divorce and things had gotten out of hand. His daughter and the child’s mother obtained a legal document that prevented her husband from coming near her and the daughter. It was only a short time that I began to see a man visiting this lady who was divorcing her husband. Soon she moved out of her parent’s house and left with this man. However, the little girl (I would say about eight years old) has remained for the most part with her grandparents.

Undoubtedly her mother and this man now live in a different school district from where her daughter has been attending school so in order for the child to remain in her school she has to live temporarily with her grandparents. Just this morning I saw her leave with her grandfather on her way to school. Now I know that some of this is my own surmising but I think I am correct on most of this story. To my right and across a different street live a very nice couple and friends of mine. Their situation is this. He has a son and she has two sons by a previous marriage. They were married last summer and now she is expecting their child. You heard it before, “his, hers and theirs.” Sadly to say this has become common place in our society today.

I feel sorry for people in homes where there has been a divorce. Children suffer so deeply when their parents do not stay together. Without passing judgment I may say that there are no good divorces. Someone has sinned and souls may be in danger of being lost. Children are being separated from one parent and can only see him or her on occasions. Longevity in marriage is fast becoming obsolete. It ‘blows their minds’ when I tell young people that my wife and I have been married for fifty-two years. “Until death do us part” may already be an antiquated statement that is no longer being used in marriage ceremonies for many couples.

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century ~Mark Twain

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person ~Mignon McLaughlin

Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’? and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? “So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate (Matthew 19:4-6) ~Jesus Christ