On becoming real........

This picture was taken by Barbara two days after we were
married in January 1983...Don't exactly look happy do I? That's because I had
realized in those last two days that now I had to become "real"... and I was scared
to death. What haunted me were the piercing words a wise young woman had written me  when I was younger after reading something I had written.  She wrote, "Read your words...bleed the
nerves...why don't you leave your words and live them," (would have been a
fitting epitaph if I had died at the time.) I had no foundation to stand on and
I was afraid that Barbara was realizing that. That day I made my commitment and
thus began the process of us both becoming "real" through the way God uses marriage to
reconcile a man and a woman.

Many of you know our story of rocky beginnings and the
storms we weathered as well as the golden days we enjoyed in the ensuing years,
as both of us became more real. It was a long process with both of us giving
and taking ground where God led and a lot of brokenness...Barbara and I came
together with so much baggage...but because we did not give up for the sake of
the family, God made up the difference. 
C.S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife, Joy....about what love
over a period of time becomes, "For this is one of the miracles of love; it
gives -- to both, but perhaps especially to the woman -- a power of seeing
through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted." C.S. Lewis

 I have been reading, "A Grief Observed" C.S. Lewis, which I
must admit has been in our library for years, but neither Barbara or I ever
read it...every time we picked it up, (we used to read books to each other) we
could not relate. Now I understand what he was talking about...and it is not
really something anyone can really begin to comprehend until they are in the
midst of this grief and loss themselves. Many people have asked me, "Why do you think
this happened?" or my favorite, "What was God thinking?" In answer to that, I came to a realization this week..... God gave us our best time together in the last hour we had
before she had her stroke....Knowing Barbara and how she'd become more
"real" in those thirty plus years we'd been together...she was
perfect in that hour...She had become "real." It was her time to go topside... I'm so grateful for that special hour and our thirty plus years together....but so sad that
she won't be finishing the journey with me....She's already in the Winner's
Circle, and I'm barely making it around the track... but at least I'm not
waiting for her in Monte Rio...(Stick with each other...it's worth it.)

In His grip,

Papa Tripp

"The most precious gift that marriage gave me
was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all
the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real."
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed