Well, I’ve now been married to my beautiful wife for almost a year. It’s pretty unbelievable actually. On June 18th we will celebrate our first anniversary. I have to say that this has been the best one year of my entire life. I don’t understand this thing about the first year being the hardest… that’s what they say about the first year anyway.

Here are a few pictures from our trip to Silver Dollar City on Monday of this week:

We got a little wet on this ride…
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We went on a ride called the Powder Keg. The interesting thing about this ride is that it went from about zero to 60 in about 2 seconds. It was some kind of take off. They also had a little bit of humor when building this ride:

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And a final bit of humor at the entrance to the Powder Keg:

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We also went on a tour of Marvel Cave:

It is hard to get good pictures in the dark with an automatic camera and for other reasons… if you know what you are looking at, you can see the entrance to the cave and the stairs down into it.

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And now I have saved the best for last:

This is a picture from the surprise celebration for my parents 25th anniversary.

Yesterday marked my parent’s 25th wedding anniversary. My wife and I, and the two oldest of my younger sisters planned a surprise celebration for after church. They were actually able to sneak old pictures and wedding pictures out of the house without mom or dad figuring it out. It was great.

We had a potluck meal after church, decorated the place with balloons and had nice red table cloth and nice stuff like that. We also made mom and dad cut the cake (I was disappointed that we didn’t make them stuff each others face though).

I have been privileged to be raised by some wonderful parents and they have set an excellent role model for myself and Rachel, as well as for the rest of the children when they get married.

During the course of events my dad was asked to share some words of wisdom about how to make it to 25 years of marriage in a culture with such a high divorce rate as ours. Indeed, my dad has said before that of all the friends he had from his younger years, of all his peers, he is the only one that has made it this far. His words of wisdom were that you love each other no matter what. When the Bible says, husbands love your wives, it was issuing a command. There is no choice in whether or not you love your wife. He also said that it is a decision you make, you decide that divorce is not an option.

I think that in our culture today, we go into marriage with the idea that divorce is always an option if we become dissatisfied. Actually that idea fails to recognize that our Lord Jesus Christ only gave only one reason for divorce, and that was adultery. In other words the only acceptable divorce is if your spouse has committed adultery. The Bible gives no other case for divorce.

So, my mom and dad made the decision that there would be no divorce because God said so. That’s how they made it to 25 years, and also of course by the grace of God who enables them to keep the covenant that they made, and who enabled them to realize that they were making a covenant of such a nature that could not be so easily broken as our culture likes to think.

This is from the shoot in Peoria last weekend:

© 2005 David Price

Charles and I were able to do a lot of recording, but while he was in town (he lives 8 hours away from me currently) we did nothing but the actual recording, and I have had very little time to do any mixing. However, I’ve been hacking away at it slowly.