The Love of a Lifetime

My Momma is the one on the left!

              
The dark-haired beauty had just finished her sophomore year at FSU. She and her identical twin spent each summer at the family's bay house on Cinco Bayou just outside of Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. The house next door had been rented by a family from Opp, Alabama. The only son was a cadet at West Point and would be joining his family for the two-week vacation during his summer leave. My parents fell in love at the beach during those two weeks.            
      Reliable sources say that the two had "eyes only for each other" and were pretty much worthless during that two week time. She ate dinner with his family and went on dates with him in the family Chrysler. He ate dinner with her family and spent every waking moment with his eyes on the dark-haired beauty. At dinner one night his seven-year-old cousin asked the girl the question that was in the back of everyone's mind: "Are you going to marry him?" The grandmother took the little boy aside to scold him, but my father purportedly just looked intently into my mother's eyes. It would be two years before the two stood before God and the witnesses to make it official, but there is little doubt that the love for a lifetime began that summer.
    The hard thing about this story is that it ends all too soon. My parents were married only eleven short years before a brain tumor took the love of my mother's life away, living her widowed at 33 with three little girls. In the short time that they had been married they had travelled far and wide. She had gladly followed this Air Force pilot to make a home wherever he was stationed. What no one knew was that time was already running out for them.
    For my parents, the romance never dimmed. They never faced the challenges of teenage age daughters or college expenses or the joy of seeing their daughters become parents. They never had the chance to grow old together. In some respects the young couple are frozen in time. My mother is 82 now. I called this morning to wish her a Happy Valentine's Day and to ask her a couple of questions so I could get the details of this story correct. The tears caught at her throat almost immediately. Yet I could hear the joy in her voice as well as she described my parents' life together. I know that in all her years of living, her love for this man has never waned, never faded, never lost its shine or beauty. I don't understand the ways of God or why a young man with so much promise and so much to do was taken from his wife and his children at such a young age. We live in that fallen world on this side of Eden where cancer and lives cut short are sadly a fact of life. It makes it no less painful to know that it will not always be so, but it does bring hope of an enduring nature to the human heart to know that the glories of heaven and the promise of redemption await those who believe in the Lord.

    The scripture is clear that men and women will not be given in marriage in heaven. But I do believe that where two became one on earth, there will be the memory and the recognition of that eternal bond in the life beyond. Though she seeks to live each day fully, I know that my dear Momma is looking forward to the day when she will cross over. She will look her Savior in the face and know fully as she has always been fully known. Her heart will be at rest. Then she will turn at the sound of the name that only my Daddy called her to hear the words, "Bobbie, I have been waiting for you..."