I happen to live in the moment sometimes not thinking about the past or future. Today I woke up from a dream I still have on my mind. It was about my first real love. It was real, but it wasn’t meant to be. Then I married at twenty-one to an eighteen year old girl. I spent thirty seven years and two sons trying to make it work.

In December of 2008 I met someone. She was married as well, but we were both floundering in failing marriages. By May of 2009 we were together. We both left marriages of over thirty years each.

We have been inseparable since the day we met the first time in January 2009. My “now” wife and I got married two weeks after my divorce was finalized in 2015. She has been my inspiration to stay alive and solve anything life throws at us. Everyone we ever met since we’ve been together thought we were already married.

The retrospect comes from the “what if” realm. What if we had met when we were young. Back in those days she was hanging out with my brother, who later wanted to get serious with her, but she only felt it to be a great friendship. Still I never knew her. She had moved to my hometown the year after I left for the Army. It was strange that we came close in some ways and could have crossed paths. Both of us have wondered what would have happened had we met and married back then.

I picture us married with five sons. I feel that so strongly. I feel like I missed out on something so much more than what I had in my past marriage. We have been such a good team. We communicate. Something my previous marriage never seemed to have. We can even go out to eat and without speaking order the same thing from the menu. We’re that close. When I was ordained into the ministry she came to me wanting the same thing and now she, too, is ordained and has her own ministry.

I wonder how much more God could have done with both of us in a longer period of time. Then I have to wonder if all my life was ordered to be what it is without the “what if”. My wife and I rest in our love for each other and know that God put us together in the turmoil of times we went through.

This throws me back to a PBS program we watched this past weekend. It was about the life of a Nashville icon Carl Jackson. There was a song that struck my thinking. The title of it was “There Is No Future In The Past”. How much more truth can that say?