A Good Year

A Good Year

This past weekend Steve and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary.

This has been a good year.

I think about that word good. Our English language tends to overuse and cause words to become benign. Adjectives so common and so banal (nice, pretty, cute) that we don’t even realize we use them. They become the catch-all words when we don’t know what else to say or use; they are safe.

A good year.

But this isn’t a safe or common description for us. Getting married at forty-something and fifty- something wasn’t a safe thing to do. We both took a risk—one that neither one of us ever thought about taking again. Our year together has been anything but common.

We have had one fight this past year and it was a hard one, but there was communication afterwards, and the resolve was beneficial to both of us—we learned about ourselves and each other. In this year we have laughed with and at each other. We have worried about each other, teased each other and pushed and challenged each other. We have cried together, we have prayed together, studied together and taught together.

We have loved each other.

Mutually.

Equally.

Together.

It has been a good year.

In the Gospels during Jesus’ last Passover week he is anointed by a woman. There are questions and comments concerning this woman’s reputation and possibly her motivation. She takes a risk. And Jesus declares it a good and beautiful thing.

Various versions translate the word differently. There are two words used for good in the Greek language. One is agathos and it means morally good. Righteous and upstanding. Jesus, however, uses a different word to describe what this woman has done for him. He uses kalos.

This word means good, but it has other layers. Other nuances. It means winsome and lovely and beautiful.

This is the word I would use to describe our good year.

It has been lovely. Winsomely good—achingly so.

Someone asked if we had a good anniversary day. The answer is yes we did, but what was so incredible about the day was that it was much like the other 364 days we had spent together. There wasn’t this sudden interest and heightened sense of romance or expectation. The car door was opened for me, but, you see, that happens for me every day. My hand was held wherever we walked that day, but that happens daily. We sat next to each other in our booth for our anniversary dinner, but that happens when we go out to the local Mexican restaurant here at home. We did exchange anniversary gifts, but we did that several weeks ago and we talked about and chose them together.

A delightfully, remarkably ordinary day together.

It is this beautiful, daily together life that made our first anniversary so good (kalos) for me.