"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love." (1 John 4:7-8)

June 23, 2026

Dear friends,

Recently, my wife and I attended a 60th anniversary celebration of a couple that we have known for many years. It was a large and joyful occasion with many people from our church, and from their past, along with their grown children and grandchildren. There were photos and testimonies and stories and readings.

Of the readings, there were two poems, especially, that moved me. One was Shakespeare's “Sonnet 116”, a poem about the constant and unchanging nature of true love. It is a fitting description of this couple's sixty years of marital love. From the very beginning, it was clear that God would be at the center of their marriage. God's love is the kind that "alters not with brief hours and weeks..." His love endures forever and so enables marriages to bear out "even to the edge of doom."

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

The second poem is a more contemporary work, entitled, "The wild rose", written by Wendell Berry:

"Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,

suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only a shade,

and once more I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before."

This poem evokes so many moments in my own marriage. I'm walking happily along with my spouse of fifty-one years -- now aspiring to sixty (I feel like such a slacker) -- I'm walking along, scarcely aware of my wife's companionship, unaware of her as of my own beating heart, until something she says or does -- or a look or a smile from her -- becomes like a sunbeam or an unexpected blossom, and in a flash I'm reminded all over again how I came to love her. And then, of course, I want to ask her to marry me again. As Berry writes, "...and once more I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before."

Perhaps I'm impatient with reading too many words and paragraphs these days, but I have come to appreciate poetry more, much more. Maybe, I'm older or just lazy, but poetry seems to get to the point faster and with feeling. A book that has been helpful to me in learning to better appreciate poetry is The Soul in Paraphrase: A Treasury of Classic Devotional Poems, by Leland Ryken (Crossway, 2018). This book was a marvelous gift to me from two very good friends.

That's it for this week!

Sandy

Afterwords is an occasional newsletter on topics of interest to me (Sandy Young) since my retirement from full-time pastoral ministry. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.