This quote from Larry Crabb was clipped from Mike Cope’s blog post today.
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We are in Abilene for Ann’s parent’s wedding anniversary and 90th birthdays. The article below appeared in the local paper. We’re looking forward to the weekend when there will be a reception and several family gatherings.
Celebrating 70 years together
Reporter-News photo by Thomas Metthe
L. Arnold Watson and his wife, Ruby Mae White Watson, stand outside the administration building at Abilene Christian University, where they met in 1937, when ACU was still Abilene Christian College. The couple’s 70th wedding anniversary is April 30.
It was the spring of 1937, and Ruby Mae White had just graduated from Abilene High School and Arnold Watson had received his high school diploma in Idaho.
Whether it was destiny or coincidence, the two eventually met, and that meeting would lead to a 70-year marriage.
Ruby Mae and Arnold Watson’s wedding anniversary is April 30, but they will celebrate this lifelong union with family and close friends April 25.
The couple, both 90 years old, met after Ruby Mae received a half scholarship to pursue a business degree and Arnold left Idaho to pursue ministry at Abilene Christian College, now a university.
The future couple inevitably shared courses at ACC, where they sat side by side in English and Bible classes thanks to alphabetical seating.
After more than a year of dating, the couple married and began their lifelong journey as man and wife. After college, they traveled while Arnold preached. He later finished his degree and earned a master’s degree and retired after a lifetime of preaching.
The couple had three sons and two daughters, 14 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren.
If you asked the couple how they were able to stay together for 70 years, they would both respond: Happy marriages just don’t happen, it’s something you work at.
Ruby Mae, a homemaker, said a mixture of humor, respect and appreciation helped contribute to the couple’s long-lasting relationship.
“You need a sense of humor and sometimes you need to tie a knot and hold on, because there will be tough and trying times,” Ruby Mae said. “There also needs to be a lot of respect and appreciation. My husband still thanks me for every meal when he gets up from the table. I enjoy that.”
Arnold also devised a family rule when the two married to emphasize the importance of communication.
“A kind of a rule I had fairly early in our marriage was that we never went to bed at night mad at each other. If there had been an argument that night, we would settle it,” Arnold said.
Arnold and Ruby Mae both shared the same Christian faith, and they said that faith was the cornerstone of their marriage.
“The fact that we began unified in our religious convictions helped build our marriage,” Arnold said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like if one of us were of a different faith working through some of the challenges that come with marriage and having a family. I think that’d be tough.”
Now after 70 years, the Watsons’ love for one another still grows.
“You don’t quit loving each other it’s a deeper love that grows, a love of respect as you get older,” said Ruby Mae. “Till the Good Lord sees fit to take one of us to be with him, we’ll be together and be happy.”
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“What comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” A.W. Tozer
I came across the above quotation several years ago in Tozer’s book The Knowledge of the Holy. It has had a significant impact on my thinking and consequently the path that my journey has followed. It was fairly easy to accept the validity of Tozer’s statement. How we think of God shapes everything about us. It matters not whether we are Christian or Buddist or whatever other faith, or agnostic or atheist, the statement is true of all of us.
Having accepted Tozer’s premise, it became clearer that the central purpose of my existence should be to understand and know God so that what comes into my mind when I think about Him is true. It is apparent to me that all contrast and conflicts in our beliefs or unbelief can be ultimately traced back to what we believe about God. The dilemma is how do we come to truly know God? This question opens Pandora’s box and generates hundreds of questions and answers.
I am currently reading reJesus by Frost and Hearst. In a discussion on the subject of thinking correctly about God, they cited this quote from Albert Nolan. I believe Nolan’s insights are critical to moving us along the pathway to thinking correctly about God.
I have chosen this [the Christ-like God] approach because it enables us to avoid the perennial mistake of superimposing upon the life and personality of Jesus our preconceived ideas of what God is supposed to be like.
By his words and praxis, Jesus himself changed the content of the word “God”. If we do not allow him to change our image of God, we will not be able to say that he is our Lord and our God. To choose him as our God is to make him the source of our information about divinity and to refuse to superimpose upon him our own ideas of divinity.
This is the meaning of the traditional assertion that Jesus is the Word of God. Jesus reveals God to us, God does not reveal Jesus to us. God is not the Word of Jesus, that is to say, our ideas about God cannot throw any light upon the life of Jesus. To argue from God to Jesus instead of arguing from Jesus to God is to put the cart before the horse. This, of course, is what many Christians have tried to do. It has generally led them into a series of meaningless speculations which only cloud the issue and which prevent Jesus from revealing God to us.
We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God: we must deduce everything about God from what we do know about Jesus.
Thus, when we say that Jesus is divine, we do not wish to add anything to what we have been able to discover about him so far, nor do we wish to change anything that we have said about him. To say now suddenly that Jesus is divine does not change our understanding of Jesus: it changes our understanding of divinity. We are not only turning away from the gods of money, power, prestige or self: we are turning away from all the old images of a personal God in order to find our God in Jesus and what he stood for.
This is not to say that we must abolish the Old Testament and reject the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It means that if we accept Jesus as divine, we muat reinterpret the Old Testament from Jesus’ point of view and try to understand the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the way in which Jesus did. We have seen what Jesus was like. If we now wish to treat him as our God, we would have to conclude that our God does not want to be served by us, but waits on us. If this is a true picture of God, then God is more truly human, more thoroughly humane than any human. God is what Schillebeeckx has called a Deus humanissimus, a supremely human God.
Pictures of me from the Papa John’s 10 Miler are now available for purchase HERE. Don’t wait they may sell out. The Papa John’s 10 Miler was the last leg of the Louisville Triple Crown of Running. I was able to run(?) the entire 10 miles. My time was reasonable for me – 2:00:21. Especially since my time two years ago was 2:01:25. My goal was 2:00:00. I am glad that I ran all three races but the question that was on my mind most of the last 4 miles Saturday was WHY?