Marriage is a beautiful dance.
Marriage is two people lost in the moment whose inseparable hearts beat to the rhythm of life while dancing cheek-to-cheek.
Marriage is an invitation to journey together, a hand reaching from across the table for the other as music plays their song to say, “Shall we dance?”
Young love says nothing about age, as the awakening of one’s heart is a miracle from God whose hand can touch you at any stage of your life.
Young married love, a play-list and series of songs, a dance card which keeps you close during those new beginnings as man and wife.
Twenty-seven years ago on our wedding day, I never realized we’d unwrap a jute-box of albums I had never heard before, yet music we’d need to learn the words and attempt to line-dance to during our early years of marriage.
That unfamiliar genre and play-list for blended marriages, blended love, parenting, siblings, culture, finances, and all those contemporary songs we’d learn along the way when driving, dating, college, and then their marriages were the in music for our family.
Year after year following our first day of marriage, the family dance moves became more complex to choreograph.
Yet echoing from the “surround sound” of two hearts head-over-heels in love after twenty-seven years together, are the lyrics to our song still playing as when his hand first reached across the table for mine to ask, “Shall we dance?”
Young married love says nothing about age as the awakening of one’s heart is a miracle from God whose hand can touch you and keep you deeply in love for every stage of your life.
The old songs that rewind the music video of our love story never go out of style.
They are the anthems we’ve been singing and dancing to for years with our children and now grandchildren as part of their inheritance to sear into their remembrance what true love looks like and sounds like long after their parents and grandparent’s lives become a memory.
When our hearts awakened over the births of our ten grandchildren, the genre of music we danced to repeated once again from the play-list of our young love, renewed and head-over-heels with these angelic faces that call us Papa and Gaga.
Marriage is a beautiful dance and every grandchild of ours has grown up to know they have a special place in our circle of love.
These ten lives are part of our song; they are the lyrics that give us joy to sing to; to dance to.
The music never stops whenever they are with us.
Our grown sons are now fathers reaching for the innocent hands of their daughters to dance.
Both cheek to cheek, they sway to the music of their song, while writing new lyrics and memories to call their own, the inheritance they’ll pass on to their future generation.
The years, they come and go so quickly.
A revolving door of days and weeks you beg the pace to slow, yet music whose turntable only plays at one speed.
Our marriage, we never weary of our song.
Our young love is still the same age these twenty-seven years after we said, “I do.”
A dance for the history books, a hit song for the generations beyond our lives.
This journey of marriage he invited me on all those years ago is a once in a lifetime adventure I’d say “yes” to all over again.
The gleam in his eye that sparkled like a shooting star from across the table so many years ago still catches my attention today.
I look for him from around the room whenever the band is playing our song, waiting restlessly as a little girl until he reaches for my hand to say,
“Shall we dance?”
