Thanksgiving Day this year marked my parents’ sixty-first wedding anniversary. That’s a good long time. My bride and I will need another twenty-five years to make it that far. 

Perseverance, endurance, patience, and kindness in abundance are required to produce that kind of staying power. They have bypassed many off-ramps to arrive where they are. What has kept them together has been much stronger than what threatened to tear them apart. For this, I am forever grateful. 

Who are the marriage pacesetters for you? What couples do you know who have hung in there through thick or thin for decades? Let us give thanks for them today. Let us make an ever more resolute connection with those we live in deep and abiding relationship with. 

Let us give thanks for love, real love, that goes the distance, that deepens by the day, that broadens over a lifetime, and that lifts us to new heights with every challenge overcome.-