Yesterday was a big day, it was our 15th wedding anniversary, which is pretty amazing. God has really blessed me by putting Mary in my life, I am who I am and I have done much more because of her encouragement and support. She keeps me grounded and focused probably more than I realize. Mary and I spent some time reflecting on where we have been, things we have done and the many ways we have grown. It seems that when we got married, we thought we really had it going on and knew it all. Looking back now, we realize, we knew nothing and we had so much to learn. Now we can honestly say we really do got it going on and now we do know it all. I guess some things never change. heh Actually, I think the difference is now we know we don’t know it all and we know more than ever that the more we trust God and surrender to Him, the less we know what tomorrow will bring. We do know we are safe in His arms, and more than ever, we want to follow Him where He leads. I got to thinking about how long 15 years really is and this week I did some calculating to help put it in perspective. Check this out. 15 years is:
- 180 months
- 5,479 days
- 131,496 hours
- 7,889,760 minutes
- 473,385,600 seconds
That’s as far as I took it, I’m sure there are some smaller increments, probably milliseconds, but come on. That’s a lot of seconds to be married. By the way, for those of you that might be checking my math, these calculations include 4 extra days for 4 leap years. (I made a cool little spreadsheet that let’s me enter the number of years and it calculates all of the above, including leap years. So if you’re curious how your length of marriage translates to the above increments, let me know. I know, I need a life.) Some other little known facts about our 15 years of marriage. We have:
- lived in 4 apartments
- lived in 4 houses(1 house for 10 years, 3 houses in the past 3 years and we are happy to be settled again)
- lived in 5 cities in 3 states
- had 17 pets (4 gerbils, 2 dogs, 1 cat, 10 unnamed fish…we still have the 2 dogs and 2 of the unnamed fish)
- 2 children (still have both of them, we have had our 2 dogs longer than we have had our kids, so the dogs are pretty elderly by now, one dog is nearly blind and one dog is dumb)
- been members of 5 churches
- we have had 14 cars between us (most of those occured in the first 5 years of our marriage, pre-kids, before practicality set in, I wish we had one more car to make it 1 per year. The Jeep Liberty Mary has her eyes on is a little ways off yet, unfortunately.)
So there you have it. We praise God that we have made it this far and look forward to many more years together. By the way, I did receive my Triple Pack, the 3 Simply Strategic books yesterday. We got home later last night, so about all I have had time to do is get them out of the package and flip through them. I did bring Brad’s replacement book in to the office today so he can have it. Now I have to hurry and read the new one before he does!