Nothing is impossible for God.”

Luke 1:37

Okay, I know that I have picked up a few new readers over the past couple of months. So that means some people may not know about the anniversary thing that Rebekah and I enjoy so much.

It’s more than just our wedding, August 18th, and of course our birthdays; we celebrate Engagement Day too, on October 7th. Plus “First Date Day,” February 4th; first date day is huge. We have been dating, pretty much nonstop, for the past 47 years. That’s 17, 166 days.

We were both students at Stetson University, and all we did was to go to a basketball game along with a group of friends. Rebekah was the one who asked me out, only she didn’t have to do it more than once because I realized pretty quickly what a remarkable human being she was.

21 years old, both of us, and there life was, laid out in front of us like a huge uncharted landscape and anything was possible, anything at all. Of course that is what a lot of people think, and it’s the way they see the world when they are young and in love. But the difference with me and Rebekah is that it turned out to be true. Anything absolutely was possible – is possible, and we moved forward into this life together with the confidence that our faith is real and our God is faithful and our dreams really do lead us into something amazing.

And that has been our story – real and faithful and amazing. But at the same time it has been like the bookmark Rebekah uses to keep our place in one of the daily devotions we are using. “Faith does not make things easy,” it reads; “faith makes them possible.”

If I were to write a memoir the title would have to read something like this: “Landing on my feet.” Because that is how I always feel when I look back, with awe and with gratitude, at another year in our story together.

So we will celebrate, and we will always be thankful. And then we will live in the only way we know how – live like we mean it – because God certainly intended something remarkable when God set this whole thing in motion, back on February 4th in 1977.

In love, and because of love – DEREK