A year of jubilee

Our engagement story

Fifty years ago this week, I asked the lovely Katie Jones to marry me.

I’d asked her dad’s permission the night before. Paul Jones had ten kids, with five daughters, so I don’t know how picky he was being. But he seemed to think it was a good idea. And her mom loved me and made great German potato salad.

We were at her home in Michigan, just across the state line from Toledo. I’d driven up from Tennessee where I was living. Just north of Dayton, Ohio, I ran into a blizzard and was blown off the road. A cop came by to tell me it would be a few hours before a tow truck could get to me, but then he got stuck himself and when a truck came to get him right away, the guy pulled me out at no charge.

For context, I was actually from south Florida. I had a coat with no buttons and had probably never seen a man wearing a scarf. I’d brought Katie a couple of gifts, including an orange sweater that wasn’t her color. And I didn’t have an engagement ring. Yet. But these were trivial challenges, compared to some we’ve faced since then. We’ve experienced losses and reversals. And great, great grace.

But that evening I told her I loved her for the first time, and she already knew the next thing I would do was ask her to marry me. We had talked about this. In an earlier relationship I I had hurt someone by talking about love when I didn’t know what it meant. So I had determined not to say “I love you” to anyone until I knew it was the woman I would marry.

As it turned out, I still didn’t really know what I was taking about. But she was the girl and this was the time. I was 20, and she was 22. I’d finished college. Had a job. Was madly in love. And she liked me. She said yes, despite some insecurities and fears.

They loaned me a coat with buttons and some gloves and we went sledding over the weekend with some friends. She told me she was thinking a year or or two for the engagement, but I said we should just get married right away. So I left after the weekend and planned to come get her in February. She would move back to Tennessee, where we had met in college, and we would get married in June.

I found a custom-made ring at jewelry store in Chattanooga and drove back to get her in February. On the way back I gave her the ring at Cumberland Falls in southern Kentucky, where we would return for our honeymoon. She moved in with a lady in our church, who made her dress. And we planned a simple wedding at a park on Signal Mountain overlooking the Tennessee River. Simple, as in daises, and a reception with banana nut bread her mother made and Vernor’s Ginger Ale her siblings brought down from Detroit.

Her dad was 20 minutes late to the wedding. And her mom couldn’t even come, since she was caring for Katie’s grandmother who was near death. The bridal party was composed of friends, cousins and siblings (comment if you were there). We borrow chairs from church and carried in a small electric organ. My dad performed the ceremony. And we were off on an adventure. A pilgrimage, really.

We rented a little house on Birmingham Drive in Hixson, Tennessee, and began life together. I was helping at my dad’s church, and was working at Downtown General Hospital as a respiratory therapist. Katie also got a job downtown working for an optometrist and we often ate lunch together at a little cafeteria across the street from the hospital.

Since I worked a swing shift, she sometimes rode the bus to work. We only had one car, a ’74 Gremlin for which I had traded my ’67 Camaro. It was only one of many bad decisions I made in those days. Katie was not one of those bad decisions, obviously, but I was young and had much to learn.

Between rounds I’d wander around the waiting rooms at the hospital looking for recipes in old copies of Better Homes and Gardens. It turned out Katie, the 7th of 10, had learned how to iron and clean but not how to cook. She didn’t even like German food. But by the grace of God we worked through this and other challenges, as we shall see.

But it is now our Year of Jubilee. It’s time to chronicle and celebrate our pilgrimage. In biblical times, the Year of Jubilee was a sort of super sabbath every 50 years when land lay fallow and reverted to ancestral clans. Debts were forgiven. Fortunately, we didn’t wait 50 years to forgive; we’ve had to do it practically every day.

But Jubilee followed a normal sabbath year, a year every seven years when no one planted crops. That meant people had to trust God to provide for them for two years from old stores or volunteer produce from untended fields. Marriage is like that, learning to trust God instead of hacking away at a small garden on a rocky mountain side. Here is what the Lord said, in Leviticus 25:

The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and dwell in it securely. And if you say, ‘What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?’ I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year, so that it will produce a crop sufficient for three years.

We have certainly eaten our fill and dwelled in the land securely. So that’s the project these next five months, to recount the Lord’s faithfulness over five decades. This includes:

• how we fell in love (January)
• how we made a home (February)
• how we kept our covenant ((March)
• how we learned, and are still learning, to trust God completely (April)
• where we are now (May), and
• what we plan to do next (June).
  

And there will be several parties. Details to follow.

It’s the year of Jubilee.