For example, Anne worked through her grief with a fist doubled and the declaration, “I will protest the wrongness of this death,” while my temperament and training was to declare, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” She, with great conviction, would declare, “Suzanne was robbed of two-thirds of her life. No one should die at age 23.” I would just as emphatically declare, “Twenty-three years were her life. She lived them to the fullest. None of us is guaranteed that we’ll live to age 60, 70, 80, or 90.”

Now, as we back off from the intensity of working through our grief, I will be the first to acknowledge Anne was absolutely right in what she said. So was I. We needed each other to have a healthy balance. Neither one of us was more spiritual than the other. Part of what drew us together in the first place was my need for her emotional makeup and her need for mine. Life would be dull and boring if we married a person identical to us.

Granted, sometimes we drive each other crazy in our differences, don’t we? And yet, that’s what makes life exhilarating and fun—that we’re not the same. Not only is there a difference between a man and a woman. More profoundly, we are privileged to celebrate the differences in the way we are made and the way we think as two equal human beings. Granted, we can get knocked off balance in those moments when we do not celebrate those differences. However, when we remember the complementary nature of who we are as created in the image of God—each unique, each very special—there’s a joy and excitement present.

There’s a footnote I must add that God’s gift to us of children in a marriage is both amazing and amusing, when we stop to reflect on how three children coming from the same parents, who everyone can look at and know are product of John and Anne, but at the same time are so different both in appearance and temperament. Isn’t it great to see the individuality, the uniqueness in each of us?

Lesson 6: I dare not take myself too seriously.

Now, most of these lessons I have learned. This one I have not fully learned. I’m still in the process of trying to learn it.

By nature, I’m a serious person, and I have a tendency to take myself too seriously. I can be hurt by slights. I am sensitive to put-downs and criticism. I want to be liked.

Throughout the years, I’ve tried to learn to laugh at myself. Sometimes I’m good at it. Then, just as soon as I’ve learned it, I unlearn it and have to start all over again.

The biblical characters I admire the most are people who were so secure in who they were that they were able to take a lot of abuse. The Apostle Paul was one of them. He gives a grocery list of some of the difficulties he faced in life.