The Power of a Promise
Looking back on 50 years of marriage, and finding wisdom for today . . .
My dear granddaughter,
You've been on my mind ever since this ship left New York, and I know why. You're exactly the age I was - two months short of your twentieth birthday - when Papa John and I were married 50 years ago. But its what happened onboard this morning that's brought me down to our stateroom to write to you.
Each night, Kerlin, a schedule of the next day's events is slipped beneath our door. Lectures, concerts, dance classes, bingo games several choices every hour. Over early-morning tea, brought to our cabin by a white-coated steward, Papa John and I go over the possibilities. Today a new one caught our eye:
11:00 A.M.: Renewal of Marriage Vows, Archdeacon Robert Willing The Yacht Club
It sounded like the very thing for a fiftieth-anniversary celebration. So, just before 11:00 A.M. we made our way to the stern of the ship. Seven couples, all of us past middle age, took seats in the Yacht Club as a tall, bearded man with a gleaming bald head outlined the service. There'd be a Bible reading - the passage on love from First Corinthians. Then the couples would face each other and answer I do to the traditional promises.
But first, the minister said, I want us to think a bit about the state of marriage in our day. At the close of the twentieth century, he went on, the whole concept of matrimony, of a binding, lifelong commitment between two people, is under scrutiny.
Of course, Kerlin, my mind went at once to the conversation you and I had at Christmas time. I was telling you we'd chosen the Queen Elizabeth 2 for this trip because it was on her namesake, the Queen Elizabeth, en route to Europe in 1947, that Papa John and I first met. We fell in love and were married in Switzerland just four months later, I said.
And you said, I might fall in love someday, Gran, but I'd never take a chance on marriage!
I understood that reaction, Kerlin, with partnerships so fluid today. I remember your telling me rather wistfully, when you were in grade school, that all your friends there in Nashville had two Christmases, one with their mother, one with their father. Marriage vows like the ones we just repeated, promises to stick together till death do us part, must seem either naive or insincere - flexible, temporary, open relationships appear both safer and more honest.
Reverend Robert Willing urged us old-marrieds to take a message to young people today. Can we really, I wonder? Can our experience mean anything now? So much has changed! In 1947 you traveled by ship because that was the way you got to Europe. You married because that was the way two people in love could live together. Today going by ship is an option - traditional and romantic - but you can get where you're going quicker and cheaper by air. You can get seemingly everything marriage offers quicker and cheaper too.
So why get married? What makes marriage any different from living with a significant other? Most of the weddings we've attended recently have been between couples who've lived together for years. When they take the formal step of marriage, does anything change? I think it does, and I think the change is precisely the making of promises.
Promises are scary things. To keep them means relinquishing some of our freedom; to break them means losing some of our integrity. Though we have to make them today, promises are all about tomorrow and the only thing we know for sure about tomorrow is that we don't know anything for sure! Remember I told you how glad we were that we'd be sailing from New York at night because we'd see the lighted skyline? Well, we left in a fog so dense we couldn't even see the bow of the ship. We couldn't see any farther ahead than the partners in a marriage can.
How do you keep promises when all you can expect is the unexpected? On the QE2 there are things we couldn't have imagined aboard the Queen Elizabeth. TV in our cabin; satellite phones; a small-format New York Times faxed to the ship each day; a Computer Learning Center where we gray-haired learners assure one another, My grandchildren say this is easy. Change is the rule of life, not permanence.
And its not just the outer world that changes in unforeseeable ways; it's you yourself. Every new experience - new responsibilities, new contacts - changes your perspective.
There's something that makes promises between two people still riskier: Your partner keeps changing too. In a long-ago letter to my grandmother I wrote, "On the ship today I met an Army veteran who's on his way to the University of Geneva, just like me!" The veteran, of course, was Papa John, and through the years I've kept on meeting him. Different ages, different stages he's always someone new. I can write my granddaughter today just as I wrote my grandmother, On the ship today I met a man. I'm still meeting John, still being surprised by him.
And of course not every surprise in a marriage is welcome. Your grandfather has written about his struggle with alcohol, so you know how difficult those times were for us. And I'm sure he never expected to be nurse, housekeeper and sole functioning parent to three small children when I went into a clinical depression.
Yet out of both those traumas, tremendous growth and joy eventually came. And the reason, I think, lies in the power of a promise. In the service this morning the minister compared problems in marriage to storms at sea, our vows, to the ship that carries us through them. So far on this trip we've had smooth sailing, but I remember an ocean crossing when I was sure I'd never board a ship again. It was 1950 and we were returning to the States for the birth of our first child (your dad!). Ill with the pregnancy anyhow, on the pitching ship I couldn't keep down so much as a sip of water; my only relief for six long days was a moist washcloth John held to my lips.
But the ship kept going, and that's the point. John brought me that cloth. Our marriage has hit many storms. The collision of different upbringings. Financial crisis. The tensions of a two-career family (before this was common). The power of a promise is that it keeps partners together while the tough times turn into healing, closeness and deepened love. If we drop in and out of relationships, we don't stick around long enough to allow these good things to happen.
How can I be so sure, Kerlin, that they will happen? Fifty years ago I wasn't! For the first 12 years I could see nothing positive about storms. If it hadn't been for those promises, we'd have had very few anniversaries to celebrate! Then the most unexpected thing of all happened.
It was like this trip, where we set out in the Atlantic and now are in the Pacific! After sailing south for a week, the QE2 entered a narrow passage carved through the mountains of Panama, emerged on the opposite side of the continent and turned north. Something like that happened in our marriage, Kerlin. After a dozen years of struggling along in our own strength, we too changed direction.
Our personal Panama Canal was a virulent form of cancer. Your father was eight years old, the younger children five and two, when Papa John was given six months to live. In our need we took the "narrow way" - confession of Jesus as lord of our lives - that cut through mountains of intellectual objections and put us in a different place.
A new life began for us. It wasn't just that we started to write about the new realm we had entered, though we did. And it certainly wasn't that the storms ceased; some of the biggest ones were still ahead. The new direction was not so much what we did as what we understood. Those promises we believed we'd kept in our own strength - I can only compare them to our sitting here in our stateroom unaware of the steel hull between us and the ocean, the engines driving the ship forward, the steersman on the bridge. Its as though we believed we were crossing the deep water by our own efforts!
God was the staying power of those promises. Marriage is his design for the fullest love between a man and a woman, and when we make those vows - even when we don't know Him - he becomes the third party to the contract, affirming our love, interweaving our lives, pointing to the wash cloth by the bunk.
We can resist this grace of God, as you and I know from marriages that fail. He will not force even our own happiness on us. But every time we make a promise in line with his will, the hosts of heaven cheer!
Do you promise, the reverend asked me this morning, to love John? To comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and health, and forsake all others to be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?
I was crying, as is proper at a wedding, as I listened to the questions. Crying because the answer is, Impossible! How can any human being make such promises, when we don't know what tomorrow will bring? But I answered I do, because I knew I was saying it in the hearing of the One who holds tomorrow in his hand.
Don't be afraid, Kerlin, if you fall in love someday, to make that lifelong commitment. The two of you won't be setting sail alone!
With love from us both,
Gran
The Power of a Promise by Elizabeth Sherrill is copyright 1998 by Guideposts, Carmel, New York 10512. All rights reserved.
If you would like to reproduce this story, contact Guideposts, ATTN: Rights & Permissions Department, 16 E. 34th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10016, Permissions [email protected].
Follow up:
Four years after I wrote this letter, John and I flew to Nashville to be present at Kerlin's wedding to Jordan Richter. At the altar of St. Augustine's Church, they spoke these words to each other...
All that I have I offer you,
What you have to give I gladly receive.
Wherever you go, I will go.
You are my love.
God keep me true to you always, and you to me.
"Wherever you go, I will go..." A tremendous promise - and a risky one in this world where none of us can predict where life will lead. But because of the final line of these vows, Kerlin and Jordan know as they set out, that the One who keeps His promises goes with them.
Today Jordan works with Nashville musicians as a recording engineer. Kerlin is an artist, children's librarian, and "mostly, nowadays," she says, "a mother."
My dear granddaughter,
You've been on my mind ever since this ship left New York, and I know why. You're exactly the age I was - two months short of your twentieth birthday - when Papa John and I were married 50 years ago. But its what happened onboard this morning that's brought me down to our stateroom to write to you.
Each night, Kerlin, a schedule of the next day's events is slipped beneath our door. Lectures, concerts, dance classes, bingo games several choices every hour. Over early-morning tea, brought to our cabin by a white-coated steward, Papa John and I go over the possibilities. Today a new one caught our eye:
11:00 A.M.: Renewal of Marriage Vows, Archdeacon Robert Willing The Yacht Club
It sounded like the very thing for a fiftieth-anniversary celebration. So, just before 11:00 A.M. we made our way to the stern of the ship. Seven couples, all of us past middle age, took seats in the Yacht Club as a tall, bearded man with a gleaming bald head outlined the service. There'd be a Bible reading - the passage on love from First Corinthians. Then the couples would face each other and answer I do to the traditional promises.
But first, the minister said, I want us to think a bit about the state of marriage in our day. At the close of the twentieth century, he went on, the whole concept of matrimony, of a binding, lifelong commitment between two people, is under scrutiny.
Of course, Kerlin, my mind went at once to the conversation you and I had at Christmas time. I was telling you we'd chosen the Queen Elizabeth 2 for this trip because it was on her namesake, the Queen Elizabeth, en route to Europe in 1947, that Papa John and I first met. We fell in love and were married in Switzerland just four months later, I said.
And you said, I might fall in love someday, Gran, but I'd never take a chance on marriage!
I understood that reaction, Kerlin, with partnerships so fluid today. I remember your telling me rather wistfully, when you were in grade school, that all your friends there in Nashville had two Christmases, one with their mother, one with their father. Marriage vows like the ones we just repeated, promises to stick together till death do us part, must seem either naive or insincere - flexible, temporary, open relationships appear both safer and more honest.
Reverend Robert Willing urged us old-marrieds to take a message to young people today. Can we really, I wonder? Can our experience mean anything now? So much has changed! In 1947 you traveled by ship because that was the way you got to Europe. You married because that was the way two people in love could live together. Today going by ship is an option - traditional and romantic - but you can get where you're going quicker and cheaper by air. You can get seemingly everything marriage offers quicker and cheaper too.
So why get married? What makes marriage any different from living with a significant other? Most of the weddings we've attended recently have been between couples who've lived together for years. When they take the formal step of marriage, does anything change? I think it does, and I think the change is precisely the making of promises.
Promises are scary things. To keep them means relinquishing some of our freedom; to break them means losing some of our integrity. Though we have to make them today, promises are all about tomorrow and the only thing we know for sure about tomorrow is that we don't know anything for sure! Remember I told you how glad we were that we'd be sailing from New York at night because we'd see the lighted skyline? Well, we left in a fog so dense we couldn't even see the bow of the ship. We couldn't see any farther ahead than the partners in a marriage can.
How do you keep promises when all you can expect is the unexpected? On the QE2 there are things we couldn't have imagined aboard the Queen Elizabeth. TV in our cabin; satellite phones; a small-format New York Times faxed to the ship each day; a Computer Learning Center where we gray-haired learners assure one another, My grandchildren say this is easy. Change is the rule of life, not permanence.
And its not just the outer world that changes in unforeseeable ways; it's you yourself. Every new experience - new responsibilities, new contacts - changes your perspective.
There's something that makes promises between two people still riskier: Your partner keeps changing too. In a long-ago letter to my grandmother I wrote, "On the ship today I met an Army veteran who's on his way to the University of Geneva, just like me!" The veteran, of course, was Papa John, and through the years I've kept on meeting him. Different ages, different stages he's always someone new. I can write my granddaughter today just as I wrote my grandmother, On the ship today I met a man. I'm still meeting John, still being surprised by him.
And of course not every surprise in a marriage is welcome. Your grandfather has written about his struggle with alcohol, so you know how difficult those times were for us. And I'm sure he never expected to be nurse, housekeeper and sole functioning parent to three small children when I went into a clinical depression.
Yet out of both those traumas, tremendous growth and joy eventually came. And the reason, I think, lies in the power of a promise. In the service this morning the minister compared problems in marriage to storms at sea, our vows, to the ship that carries us through them. So far on this trip we've had smooth sailing, but I remember an ocean crossing when I was sure I'd never board a ship again. It was 1950 and we were returning to the States for the birth of our first child (your dad!). Ill with the pregnancy anyhow, on the pitching ship I couldn't keep down so much as a sip of water; my only relief for six long days was a moist washcloth John held to my lips.
But the ship kept going, and that's the point. John brought me that cloth. Our marriage has hit many storms. The collision of different upbringings. Financial crisis. The tensions of a two-career family (before this was common). The power of a promise is that it keeps partners together while the tough times turn into healing, closeness and deepened love. If we drop in and out of relationships, we don't stick around long enough to allow these good things to happen.
How can I be so sure, Kerlin, that they will happen? Fifty years ago I wasn't! For the first 12 years I could see nothing positive about storms. If it hadn't been for those promises, we'd have had very few anniversaries to celebrate! Then the most unexpected thing of all happened.
It was like this trip, where we set out in the Atlantic and now are in the Pacific! After sailing south for a week, the QE2 entered a narrow passage carved through the mountains of Panama, emerged on the opposite side of the continent and turned north. Something like that happened in our marriage, Kerlin. After a dozen years of struggling along in our own strength, we too changed direction.
Our personal Panama Canal was a virulent form of cancer. Your father was eight years old, the younger children five and two, when Papa John was given six months to live. In our need we took the "narrow way" - confession of Jesus as lord of our lives - that cut through mountains of intellectual objections and put us in a different place.
A new life began for us. It wasn't just that we started to write about the new realm we had entered, though we did. And it certainly wasn't that the storms ceased; some of the biggest ones were still ahead. The new direction was not so much what we did as what we understood. Those promises we believed we'd kept in our own strength - I can only compare them to our sitting here in our stateroom unaware of the steel hull between us and the ocean, the engines driving the ship forward, the steersman on the bridge. Its as though we believed we were crossing the deep water by our own efforts!
God was the staying power of those promises. Marriage is his design for the fullest love between a man and a woman, and when we make those vows - even when we don't know Him - he becomes the third party to the contract, affirming our love, interweaving our lives, pointing to the wash cloth by the bunk.
We can resist this grace of God, as you and I know from marriages that fail. He will not force even our own happiness on us. But every time we make a promise in line with his will, the hosts of heaven cheer!
Do you promise, the reverend asked me this morning, to love John? To comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and health, and forsake all others to be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?
I was crying, as is proper at a wedding, as I listened to the questions. Crying because the answer is, Impossible! How can any human being make such promises, when we don't know what tomorrow will bring? But I answered I do, because I knew I was saying it in the hearing of the One who holds tomorrow in his hand.
Don't be afraid, Kerlin, if you fall in love someday, to make that lifelong commitment. The two of you won't be setting sail alone!
With love from us both,
Gran
The Power of a Promise by Elizabeth Sherrill is copyright 1998 by Guideposts, Carmel, New York 10512. All rights reserved.
If you would like to reproduce this story, contact Guideposts, ATTN: Rights & Permissions Department, 16 E. 34th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10016, Permissions [email protected].
Follow up:
Four years after I wrote this letter, John and I flew to Nashville to be present at Kerlin's wedding to Jordan Richter. At the altar of St. Augustine's Church, they spoke these words to each other...
All that I have I offer you,
What you have to give I gladly receive.
Wherever you go, I will go.
You are my love.
God keep me true to you always, and you to me.
"Wherever you go, I will go..." A tremendous promise - and a risky one in this world where none of us can predict where life will lead. But because of the final line of these vows, Kerlin and Jordan know as they set out, that the One who keeps His promises goes with them.
Today Jordan works with Nashville musicians as a recording engineer. Kerlin is an artist, children's librarian, and "mostly, nowadays," she says, "a mother."