Three
riders rode silently through the silent, black night, even their eyes darkened
except in the passing illuminations when the clouds exposed the
moon. When they heard the crunch of gravel beneath the horses’
hooves, they smiled to themselves, knowing that at last they had reached the
dry riverbed which marked the last leg of their journey.
Suddenly
the horses started and reared, spooked by some invisible
danger. Before the riders could quiet them again, a Voice sliced
through the darkness: “Halt, riders. Gather stones from
this riverbed, and I assure you, when morning breaks you will be both sad and
glad.”
Stunned
into silence, after a moment the riders shrugged and broke into nervous
laughter. “We’ve nothing to lose,” said their leader. As
one man in the pale moonlight, they stooped, and each chose a handful of stones
to toss into a pocket. Their horses calmed, they remounted and rode
on until morning.
When
they stopped to water their horses and swallow their meager breakfast, one of
them remembered the stones. He emptied his pocket and gasped in
amazement. Seeing him, the other two followed suit and stared in
wonder. The handfuls of river rocks they had gathered in the night
had been transformed into rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and pearls.
As
the Voice had foretold, as morning broke they were both sad and
glad: glad they had obeyed the strange command, but weeping with
sorrow that they had not filled pockets and saddlebags to overflowing with all
they could carry.*
*************
The
unexceptional pebbles of our daily existence are the raw material Providence chooses
for the altar on which to offer ourselves back to God as a living
sacrifice. It is not the poverty of our offering but the glory of
His acceptance which transforms them into something beautiful and
enduring. Obedience in our ordinary duties becomes the outward and
visible sign – the sacrament, if you will – of the inward and spiritual grace
of His love abiding in those who obey.
The
consecrated heart discovers this transforming grace of God in every place and
activity He assigns. The commonest thing – from data entry to dishes
to preparing lesson plans to changing diapers – takes on the very glory of
heaven when done as unto the Lord.
Some reading
this may protest, “But I have POTS (or fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, Long COVID,
autoimmune disease, MS) and all I can do is lie on the couch. I can’t even read
or watch screens much right now. How am I supposed to work as unto the Lord? I
can’t work at all.”
I have been
there too. I am so thankful you are here. I recorded a reading of this post
largely for you. From my experience of life and Scripture, I can say this: if
my portion for the day is to rest a sick body, do physical therapy, swallow
pills, and navigate all that is involved in accessing medical care, even that
can be offered to the Lord as worship. If all I can do is receive care
from others, alone in a dark room and largely deprived of sensory stimuli, I
can offer my suffering to the Lord and trust Him to receive it. I can pray when
able and offer my silence and listening to Him when unable. I can seek from the
Lord a cheerful and grateful heart toward my helpers. I can lean all my weight on the everlasting arms of God and glorify Him by resting in His grace.
No matter the
life circumstance, even in prison if it comes to that: as I keep the windows of
my soul open toward Jerusalem all
day long, inviting the wind of His Spirit to blow through me, the humblest
duties become means to receive His grace.
What
is this sacramental life? For one thing, it is more easily described
than defined. As a child, I had an African violet in my bedroom
window. I never lost my amazement that, no matter how I turned it in
the morning, by the time I came home from school it had tilted itself toward
the sunlight coming through the window. When we returned to the
United States from the mission field, I would laugh at my nine year-old dog
Steinway. After 3 years of separation under my parents’ care, he
didn’t want to lose me again, I suppose, so he followed me around the house all
day long. Even when we were in the same room and I was in plain
view, he followed me with his eyes. The Ebony Dog who succeeded him
would do the same thing. His whole being was oriented toward me. The
sacramental life is like that: practicing the discipline of fixing
my eyes on Jesus, no matter what, until it becomes habit; continually adjusting
my attitude and actions in the changing circumstances of life so that the
direction of my gaze remains constant in the midst of it all.
*************
Granted,
this truth is easier to write than to live. The world, both without
and within the church, opposes it, the flesh shuns it, and the devil thwarts
it. Contemporary Christless society believes work is what we do to
earn money in order to be able to spend the rest of our time doing as we
please. On the contrary, the Scriptures teach that it is in our work
as well as our rest that we fulfill God’s design for us. Adam was
given the task of cultivating the garden in the day of his creation, not as punishment
for eating the forbidden fruit. It is only the toilsome frustration
of work now which results from sin. Even in the church, we tend to
glorify “full-time Christian service” (which being interpreted is paid
employment in gospel ministry) as somehow more holy than other vocations, but
the Scriptures teach that we are to do all things to the glory
of God (Col 3:17). Was Jesus less holy and obedient to His Father in
His first thirty years of submission to His parents, learning Joseph’s
carpentry trade, and supporting his widowed mother and siblings as was His
responsibility as the oldest son, than he was in His three years of public
ministry? Was the apostle Paul following Christ at a distance during
the days he spent making tents so that he would not place a burden on the
churches to support him? Yet in our elevation of professional
Christian ministry (especially missions) above all other careers, is this not
what we imply?
Our
own flesh, the self-life, plays right into this idea. After all,
it’s far more glamorous to write a book for the Christian bestseller list than
to write a letter to a shut-in cut off from other Christian fellowship, or a
note to tuck in a child’s lunchbox. It’s much more gratifying to the
ego to cook a meal for a roomful of grateful, hungry people at the local
homeless shelter than for a kitchen of grumbling teenagers who seem only to
complain. It may be more motivating to build a house for Habitat for
Humanity than to keep up with the home repairs on a honey-do list. It’s
often easier to travel half a world away to preach Christ to those you will
never see again than it is faithfully to live out the gospel and speak when God
opens doors among your usual acquaintances, who may make life uncomfortable for
you if they don’t agree.
The rewards for public ministry are also public; we have our
compensation in the applause of the watching crowd. The rewards for
a life lived in quiet obedience carried out before the face of God are
primarily between the soul and her Lord, although such a life cannot help but
bear fruit in the character and outward life as well, as we become what we
behold (2 Cor. 3:18). Does that make them less
precious? Hardly. What can be sweeter than going about my
day in the constant companionship of my Best-Beloved? Jesus promised
exactly that treasure to those who abide in Him by keeping His
commandments: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My
Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him. . .
. Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in
My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love;
just as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His
love. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may be in you,
and that your joy may be made full” (John 14:23; 15:9-11, NASB1995).
Finally,
the devil is all too happy to support this notion of work as something that
keeps us from doing “real ministry” and drains the joy from life. If
believed, this idea may produce a sloppily done or entirely neglected duty, all
for the sake of “ministry.” On the other hand, as Lazarus’ sister
Martha illustrates, we may be easily distracted by work as an end in itself so
that we miss God’s still, small voice speaking to us through it. The
thorns which choked the growth of the seed in the parable of the soils, after
all, are the cares and worries of the world. Either error,
forsaking duty for ministry or losing sight of God in the busyness of work,
comes from the enemy and distorts the truth.
*************
“But
how can I expect to hear a still, small voice in a carpool of noisy
pre-schoolers shouting?” or perhaps “. . . when the only beauty in my work is
the fake ivy peeking over from the next cubicle?” I never said it
was easy, but I assure you: insofar as you gather the pebbles of the ordinary
and offer them to God, you will be both sad and glad. More
importantly than my lone opinion, the testimony of the Christians of the past
assures you of the same truth.
Brother
Lawrence wrote of it as the “practice of the presence of God” in his book by
that name. Though a monk, his duties differed little from those of
the average housewife (excepting the carpool of screaming kids). He
learned the art of constant conversation with God even as he scrubbed pots and
worked in the garden, and it transformed his attitude and
relationships. This can begin simply, with a hymnal over the sink, a
recording of sacred music or Scripture playing in the car, prayer reminders
where one will see them often, or Scripture memory cards next to the computer
for those inevitable delays while the program opens or document
saves. Whatever reminds us to look back to Jesus when we lose our
focus will help us on this journey.
Martin
Luther wrote, “The works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they
be, do not differ in one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic
laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all
the works are measured before God by faith alone. . . . Indeed, the
menial housework of a manservant or maidservant is often more acceptable to God
than all the fastings and other works of a monk or priest, because the monk or
priest lacks faith” (quoted in Os Guinness, The Call, 34).
Elisabeth
Leseur, a housewife in upper-class French society in the late nineteenth
century, began to follow Christ as the rather unexpected consequence of her
husband’s attempts to persuade her to abandon the trappings of her childhood
religion and join him in militant atheism. When the Lord opened her
eyes to the folly of the arguments before her, He drew her into a personal
relationship with Himself for the first time, as her previous religion had been
merely formal with no sincerity. How did she respond to this turn of
events? She began her own self-study program of the New Testament
and the lives of Christians from history and sought to live out the life and
love of Christ with her husband and the friends her social station required her
to entertain. She lived out 1 Peter 3, despite continual ridicule
from family and friends and increasingly poor health, which prevented her from
leaving her home at all in the last years of her life. She sought to
conduct her life in keeping with resolutions such as the following:
To go more and more to souls, approaching them with respect and
delicacy, touching them with love. To try always to understand
everything and everyone. Not to argue; to work instead through
contact and example; dissipate prejudice, to reveal God and make Him felt
without speaking of him; to strengthen one’s intelligence, to enlarge one’s
soul. . . ; to love without tiring, in spite of disappointment and
indifference. . . . To learn from the Heart of Jesus the secret of
love for souls and deep knowledge of them: how to touch their hurts
without making them smart and to dress their wounds without reopening them; . .
. to disclose Truth in its entirety and yet make it known according to the
degree of light that each soul can bear (Robin Maas, “A Marriage Saved in Heaven: Elisabeth
Leseur’s Life of Love,” https://catholicladylive.blogspot.com/2011/02/marriage-saved-in-heaven.html).
Her life motto became, “Every soul that uplifts itself uplifts the
world.” After her death, the crowds of people touched by her
charitable works and correspondence, reading her journal, and her life itself
became the means of her husband’s conversion. He later entered
vocational Christian ministry and labored to keep her memory alive and honored.
The
more well-known Christian teacher Oswald Chambers writes frequently of the
“drudgery of discipleship” in his devotional classic My Utmost for His
Highest. For example, in the September 11 entry, he notes, “The
things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this
is an indication that it takes all God’s power in me to do the most commonplace
things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels
and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal
more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God
Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be
done.” Again, in the October 21 entry, he writes, “We do not need
the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can
face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of
God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery
as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple
of Jesus. It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things
for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary
things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned
in five minutes.” No, nor in five lifetimes, it sometime seems.
Finally, EvelynUnderhill,
the twentieth-century English writer on mysticism and the spiritual life, summarizes
these truths. She writes, “A spiritual life is simply a life in
which all that we do comes from the center, where we are anchored in
God: a life soaked through and through by a sense of God’s reality
and claim and self-given to the great movement of God’s
will.” Furthermore, “Some people appear to think that the ‘spiritual
life’ is a peculiar condition mainly supported by cream ices and corrected by
powders. But the solid norm of the spiritual life should be like
that of the natural life: a matter of porridge, bread and butter,
and a cut off the joint. The extremes of joy, discipline, vision,
are not in our hands, but in the Hand of God. The demand for
temperance of soul, for an acknowledgment of the sacred character of the
normal, is based on that fact – the central Christian fact – of the humble
entrance of God into our common human life. The supernatural can and
does seek and find us, in and through our daily normal
experience: the invisible in the visible” (The Soul’s
Delight, 11 and 45).
*************
The
invisible in the visible, the pearl latent in the grain of sand, the diamond in
the lump of coal, God’s grace conveyed to the human heart in the ordinary
duties at hand in each day. . . Anything done for the glory of God, in
dependence on His Spirit, in obedience to the commands of Christ, may be lifted
to our Lord as a sacrifice of praise. To quote Lilias Trotter, "Meeting
His wishes is all that matters."
May He strengthen us to learn the discipline of
offering each moment and task in faith to Him, to be transformed by His glory
into the means for His grace to take fuller possession of our hearts through
the sacrament of the ordinary.
* My version of a story John Baldwin told my church youth group
in the summer of 1990 (although some details have no doubt altered in my
memory); I have found the story used as illustration various places but not
succeeded in tracing the source. If you know, please let me know so I can
attribute it correctly.
Surrender of my will to God's will is a fundamental and ongoing part of walking with God as a Christian. It is part of presenting my body--this broken, flawed, decaying tent which would never have qualified as an Old Testament offering--as a living sacrifice made holy and pleasing by the virtues of Christ.
Opening my hands for him to take and give what He wills can feel scary, especially when He is asking us to trust Him to take something very, very valuable from us or give something very, very painful to us. For me the key that unlocks my fists is to remember two things:
The good God asking this of me loves me. In the mercies of God, He gave His only son to rescue me from sin and the resulting death when I was His wicked, sinful enemy (Romans 1-5). He gives me freedom from sin's tyranny; it is not the boss of me any more (though it constantly tries to persuade me otherwise), because I have died with Christ and been raised to walk in new life (Romans 6-7). Now there is no condemnation for me in Christ Jesus, and nothing can separate me from the love of God in Him (Romans 8). Even though I am not a Jew and therefore had no place in God's covenants with Israel by birthright, He graciously grafted me into their olive tree and made me an heir to the promises given to Abraham and his descendants (Romans 9-11).
The loving God asking this of me is all-powerful. He rules over all. Not one electron on one atom is outside of His providence. He is able to accomplish His good plans for me.
Because God is great and God is good, and He is both those things for me, I can pray words like these:
"Lord, I am willing
to receive what You send,
to do without what You withhold,
to relinquish what You take,
to suffer anything You inflict,
to do what You command,
& to be what You ask me to be,
at any cost,
now & forever.
Amen."
~author unknown
(encountered in Jerry Bridges's book Transforming Grace and an Elisabeth Elliot Gateway to Joy episode)
Without regular excavation and remembrance, the miraculous origin story of a marriage can be buried like a time capsule at the heart of the snowball of days into weeks into months into decades that accumulate so quickly. Today, our anniversary, I take my spade of sentences in hand to dig through the accretion of mundane moments to remember where we started.
The United States had soldiers in Vietnam. A new decade was learning to walk. The baby boom had subsided into a baby bust, but no one would know that from the first indignant cry of the second son and last child of Baptist missionaries in East Africa. He spent most of his childhood outside, barefoot, climbing avocado trees and running through tea plantations. He learned to sing and imagine, to improvise and hold plans loosely. Even though he had four older siblings, the demands of missionary life meant they were away at boarding school for most of his first decade. He had an imaginary friend and real friends at school, so he did not want for companionship.
Nine months and two weeks after that boy’s first cry, on the other side of the world, the first daughter was born to an Irish Catholic mother and Italian Catholic father. She spent most of her childhood inside, in ballet slippers, practicing scales on the piano and making up dances to present to any adult she could convince to play the audience. She learned to sing and imagine, to read and snuggle into nests in corners and pillow forts and under the furniture. She had two sisters whose growing up was tightly intertwined with hers. She had a best friend at school and an imaginary friend named Pinky who once had a door slammed on her. The books on her shelves were teeming with fellowship as well, so she did not want for company.
As the years passed, the boy confessed faith in Christ as his Savior and was baptized by his father. He had a beautiful voice that eventually opened doors to sing in public. He learned the Brahms Requiem for All-State Choir and made the cut. On the soccer pitch, he played goalie and earned state honors there as well. In adolescence he sensed the Lord calling him to music ministry, and his church affirmed that. He entered the renowned music school of a state university, intending to major in voice and become a church musician.
As for the girl, she didn’t come to know Jesus as her Savior, Lord, and beloved Friend until high school. By this time her family had left the church of her infancy, but the instrument of her conversion was not her church but God’s Word, which she was reading in preparation for a choir solo. In adolescence she sensed the Lord calling her to music ministry, and her church affirmed that. She entered the sacred music program of a small, church-run liberal arts college, intending to complete that and a masters of sacred music to become a church musician.
Neither path turned out as expected.
The boy found he didn’t love practicing enough to sustain a music major at his school. He changed course and completed a degree that could incorporate his completed music classes and equip him with computer skills. And allow him to finish on time. While completing his degree, he discovered a Bible church nearby and immersed himself in its college ministry and short-term missions. His ministry dream shifted from music to missions, and he raised support, sold or gave away everything he owned, and prepared to move to Eastern Europe to share the gospel and make disciples.
But that fell through, and he spent a year in ministry in Cambodia instead.
Meanwhile, the girl faced heartbreak and disillusionment, discovering in her freshman year of college that her church didn’t believe what she thought it did. She tested its teachings against the Bible, which she was reading cover-to-cover for the first time. Try as she might, she could not make them reconcile. She changed course and left university. Bereft of church community and what she thought was God’s blueprint for her adult life, she couldn’t see a path forward in any other major. She did not finish on time. When the boy was in Cambodia, she was embarking on a new course of study in English through the distance-learning programme of the University of London. While she studied, she worked in the public school system and dreamed of going to seminary and becoming a missionary. Through her sister, she discovered the same Bible church which had sent the boy overseas. She drove an hour each way on Sundays and at least once during the week to be as involved as she could be while working and studying for her degree. She never met the boy there, even after he returned from Cambodia and began seminary himself.
Eight years after she graduated from high school, she earned the credential needed for acceptance to seminary. The same seminary where her pastor had studied. The same seminary, as it happens, that the boy attended. The summer before her classes began, she stayed with a friend near the church and was able to attend early-morning missions prayer one week. The boy was there too. After all, he worked for the missions office. He introduced himself and asked the usual questions. When he learned that she wanted to move to that town and didn’t yet have work, he picked up the phone and called his former employer to help her get an interview there. She was grateful but also unsettled. This seemed awfully friendly for a first encounter. She was not interested in a boy. Her heart belonged to Greek and Hebrew.
By this time he was in his final year of a master's degree and eagerly anticipating life as one of the first missionaries sent out directly by their church after graduation. She was a new student, feeling like a deer caught in the open meadow during hunting season, desperately looking for one or two safe people to hide behind. In her first class on her first day, she discovered three other girls from her church were there too. Two of them knew her sister, so that gave instant connection. They shared the same second class too, so they all sat together again. Then came chapel, where the girls met up with some boy students from the same church and everyone sat together in a group. Then they all meandered as a unit to the cafeteria for lunch. The boy was part of that group, and sometimes they would end up next to each other in chapel. He held the hymnal and they harmonized. He had a beautiful voice.
Even though the girl was not interested in dating, let alone anything more, ten years before, as a teenager reading Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity, she had determined that, if ever there was a boy for her, she wanted to follow the courting model and not the cultural norm of dating. She also, like Elisabeth, wrote out a list of qualities she considered important in her future mate, should such a one exist.
As the weeks rolled by, lunchtime conversations—all in a group, mind you—ticked one item after another after another off that list. How unsettling. What could this mean?
The boy was leading a book club for the church singles ministry. The first book planned was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. She still wasn’t interested in the boy, but she was very much interested in discussing that beloved book. She joined the book club, but only for the literary cameraderie, you understand.
The next semester, everyone in the lunch group had classes on different days. Everyone, that is, except the boy and the girl. Another friend of the girl, not from their church, joined them sometimes, but many times she could only stay for part of lunch. Other people popped in here and there, but often the boy and the girl found themselves at the group table alone together in the crowded cafeteria.
Boys generally made the girl nervous, but this boy didn’t. That freed her to engage in conversation without wanting to hide behind something. They became friends, good friends. Through these hours of conversation, they learned that they both held to a courting ideal, both felt called to missions in Asia, both loved old hymns and singing, and both had similar missionary ideals around support-raising and interacting with the people they would serve. The VENN diagram of their reading and musical tastes seemed to overlap more than it differed, and their theological convictions matched completely. Still, the girl’s heart belonged to Biblical languages, and the boy’s heart, as it turns out, belonged to one of the girl’s friends.
As spring began to bloom on the trees and in the gardens, the girl began to realize that she would be happy talking like that for a whole lifetime of meals. It didn’t matter, though, because the boy had made it clear he only wanted friendship.
Until he didn’t. As he told it, he woke up one morning and it was like a lightbulb went on overhead. His affections changed that quickly.
The day before his birthday, he wasn’t at the lunch table. The girl was eating with her friend. She was, however, supposed to give the boy a ride to book club later. He stopped by long enough to hand the girl a missions article. “It might be interesting to talk about on the drive.”
That proved to be his final test of missiological compatibility before he asked a question that changed life for both of them in the most unexpected ways. His courage failed when they stopped for a quick supper, though. They continued to book club the same as always. Afterward, when she drove him to where he’d parked to catch his morning carpool, he suggested stopping for coffee or tea. Even though they’d just had book club at a coffee shop. (It’s a good thing that town abounded with them.)
There he asked to court her. She said, “I couldn’t think of a nicer honor.” He said, “What?” (Coffee shops are loud, even on the porch outside.) She repeated herself. He said, “Well, I guess I need to talk to your parents now.” She handed him the brick of a mobile phone she used when she would be driving late at night.
Their courtship was brief, not quite 5 months from that evening until their marriage. The boy was sure they would have adequate support to spend the new year in India, their designated home base, and they wanted as much time as possible to adjust to marriage before that. They planned a small wedding that was really a worship service, complete with congregational singing and a gospel presentation. That August Saturday was as hot and bright as expected in Texas, but no one minded, or if they did they didn’t complain.
The missions pastor emeritus visited the bride before the service and commented on her lack of nervousness. She said, “Why should I be nervous when I’m in the center of God’s will?” The pastor would then tell the assembled family that before his opening prayer. The girl would later learn how very painful the center of God’s will may be, but not that day. That day went almost entirely smoothly, and the couple’s first act as man and wife was to take the Lord’s Supper together.
Being almost as poor as the proverbial church mice, they agreed to exchange wedding gifts that didn’t cost money. The girl force-fed herself coffee until she could tolerate it without gagging, and they both presented, with no prior arrangement, framed original poems with roses as accents to each other on their wedding eve.
This unexpected marriage has continued to unfold in unexpected ways. Instead of India they moved to Thailand. Instead of moving overseas by the next January, they needed an additional year to build a support team. Life on the field involved many, many more medical appointments than anyone expected. By the end of that year, instead of homesick they were back home, the girl sick with what turned out to be autoimmune disease.
The theme song of their friendship and courtship was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” It seemed to appear in every worship gathering, formal and informal. In this unexpected twist of providence, it proved true again. The Lord provided a new job and career at the same company the boy had called to get the girl a job interview at their very first meeting. Instead of earning his living in gospel ministry and doing a little computer work on the side, he earned his living at the computer and taught Bible studies at church on the side.
The Lord has been with him, as He was with Joseph and Daniel, and given him success in this field he never would have pursued on his own initiative. It has allowed him to keep his promise to provide for the girl and ease that one burden as much as he can. It has allowed him to bless others with career assistance they didn’t expect.
Instead of training church leaders in Asia, they served together in adult Sunday school. When the unlikely opportunity arose to help disciple a small group of gifted and delightful high school students, they decided it wouldn’t hurt just to meet the youth, even though obviously youth ministry was not their calling. Three and a half years later, they celebrated the group’s graduation from high school. The boy even co-led the students on a mission trip to Guatemala. One of them is in vocational ministry today. They never would have chosen that for themselves, but God’s providence led in unexpected ways to the most joyful and fruitful shared ministry of their marriage.
Instead of writing a missionary newsletter together, the girl now writes her blog alone. (It was the boy’s idea.) She still has far more medical appointments than she ever thought possible. She still loves God’s Word and missions and dusts off her Greek as needed. She gave up Hebrew for the boy.
So much has changed in 23 years. They would not have believed the hairpin turns and dead ends on that first day, even if the prophet Samuel himself had told them. Some of them have been almost unbearably painful. Others have been almost unbearably sweet. But through all the unexpected providences, God’s faithfulness has been the starlight and shepherd’s crook guiding them. He has not left them or forsaken them, even in the darkest of storms, and He will not forsake you who belong to Him.
Happiest of anniversaries to my one and only. You are still my favorite person to harmonize with.
