When you go to a church as a pastoral candidate, you mind your manners. You are careful about what you say. You are not being hypocritical, you are just being on good behavior. When we came to this church as a pastoral candidate, my lovely wife sang a special. Before she sang, she shared with the congregation the story of when her slip fell off during church several years earlier. This is not a story you tell in that situation, but with Marsha it is not unusual. She just thinks differently. The Scripture says we are to be one flesh. It never says we are to be one mind. Good thing, in our case, for I never know just which direction her mind is going to go. I am not sure she knows, either.

          This is not a husband talking who is simply exasperated with his wife. Nay, nay. Instead of being exasperated I am highly entertained. My wife will mix up sayings. “You can lead a horse to water, but tomorrow is another day.” She will insert words into a sentence that make no sense. Sitting down to eat the evening meal she might say, “Oh, I forgot the biscuits in the coffee pot!” Of course, she would then get them from the oven. She will change topics from one sentence to the next, or even in the same sentence. “Goodness, its cold today, but Sarah said her mom is feeling a lot better.” It took me a good fifteen years to get a handle on it. That doesn’t mean I understand. It just means that I no longer let myself get a headache trying to understand.

          I am getting better at understanding, however, although I have no hope of ever catching up. One night at supper my wife spoke a sentence that had mixed metaphors, substituted words and a change in direction. I responded correctly, because I actually understood the flow. Our son, who was sitting across the table from me, looked at me with great respect. “How do you do that, Dad?” I just smiled, enjoying the moment. It is not every day you can impress your teenaged son.

          Once at supper I was joking with my son. He was getting a little perturbed with me, but I kept the conversation going. Finally, he said, “I don’t understand how you two have been married for so long! Dad’s annoying and Mom’s confusing!” Marsha looked up, oblivious, and said, “I’m not confused!” Adam didn’t know what to say.

          My wife once opened a bag of hamburger buns that had been knocked around a little in transit. The tops and the bottoms were separated. Talking all the while, she pulled two tops out of the bag. Looking down she said, “That’s odd.” She reached into the bag and pulled out the two bottoms. She looked at them and said, “Honey, this bag is defective. It’s all tops and bottoms!”

          Not long after we were married we were traveling down an interstate at night. I was exhausted and asked her to drive. She was a bit hesitant. Highway driving scared her and it was dark. “How do I stay in the middle of the lane?” I told her to keep the crease in the hood (cars don’t have creases in the hoods anymore, but they did then) lined up with the white line on the edge of the road and you would stay right dead center in the lane. With that I fell sound asleep in the passenger seat. In just a bit she woke me. “Now,” she asked me, “what do I do?” We were sitting in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. She had followed the white line up the exit, into the turn and then into the Holiday Inn lot.

          My wife was city born and bred, while I was a country boy. For the longest time, she called cows ‘moo-cows.’ She liked milk until we went to my uncle’s farm and she saw a cow being milked. (“The milk comes from those things?!?”) While in seminary I earned a little money on the side working on cars. One fellow with a Volkswagen would give me a dressed out rabbit every time I fixed his car. Marsha had some trouble for a while eating bunnies, at least the ones that weren’t chocolate. Eventually, though, she really got to liking rabbit. Deer was the same way. One church had several hunters and we always had some venison coming in. At first, we were eating Bambi, but it wasn’t long and Marsha was a regular deer gourmand. Her venison chili is the best! In fact, she has come a long way in everything. But, the first time she saw a horse in a field relieving itself she was disgusted. Surely that horse could at least go behind the barn. But it has been refreshing. It is like seeing everything for the first time.

          One of the really great moments in our marriage occurred one night when we decided we didn’t want to be disturbed. This was BA (before Adam, our son) and we were young and very much into being with each other. Phone calls or drop in visits are common in the ministry, so we were constantly with others. The night in question was the conclusion of a long day for both of us. We just didn’t feel like seeing or talking to anyone. We unplugged the phone, turned out the lights and took the TV into the bedroom. We pulled the curtains closed, got out some big boxes of chocolate covered raisins we had bought and settled down on the bed to watch a movie.

          In the dark, we opened our boxes and poured the candy into a big bowl that was between us. We began to munch as the movie came on.

          This was Miami, Florida, so mosquitoes were always a problem. When I felt something on my hand I just slapped at it in an absent-minded way. When it happened again, I slapped again. When I felt something on my face, I began to wonder. When I realized my wife was smacking away, too. I turned on the bedside lamp. There from the bowl between us were thousands of ants boiling up and out across the bed. I turned to my wife to say something, only to notice that the remains of a crushed ant lay on her lower lip. Ants were all over the bedclothes and us.

          We ran into the bathroom and both jumped in the shower. Nothing sensuous in this joint shower. We were both fully dressed and half retching. The bedroom received a thorough cleaning, but we still slept in the living room that night. For days later Marsha claimed she could still feel them crawling around in her stomach.

          Marsha has a different way of looking at things. She experiences things in a way most people never do. Sometimes it is confusing. Sometimes it is exasperating. But it is never, never boring. How many people can say that the last 42 years of their lives have not had boring moments?