If someone would have asked me thirty years ago to write an article on what it takes to make a successful marriage, I would have laughed and said “you better ask someone who knows.” Little did I know at that time, as a Catholic priest, that I would find myself in this position as a United Methodist minister, married with four children and six grandchildren. But as my friend Fr. Richard Rohr says, “The best protection against the next word of God is the last word of God.”

The last word of God, for me, was a call to the priesthood and a life of ministry in the Catholic Church. If I was not prayerful and open to the lead of God, I would have missed God’s next word, a call to married life and ultimately ministry in the United Methodist Church.

I married my wife, Suzanne, and adopted her three children and then we had a fourth child soon after. At the age of forty, that meant that there were things that we needed to learn together so that we might be successful in this marriage God had designed for us.

The first gift of our marriage was that we were very good friends.

For a few years prior to my leaving the priesthood, Suzanne and I worked closely together in a ministry that we founded. During our time together through those years we were able to develop a beautiful honest and respectful relationship as friends. Truly we were equals in the work and ministry together; clergy not better than a layperson, male not better than a woman. We were friends who shared common desire to be faithful to the work God had given to us.

Another blessing of our marriage was our desire to find the ways for God to be present in our marriage in the midst of all of the daily responsibilities of life.

The writer of the letters of John in the Bible lets us know that “God is love” and therefore the very love that we share with one another is the reality of the presence of God in the midst of our lives. Coming from a background of many spiritual disciplines, it was important for me that we together sought to find the ways to stay in close communion with God through spiritual practices in the midst of laundry, shopping and the multiple basketball games and choir rehearsals of our children.

We learned through all of the ups and downs of our relationship that if we were going to truly make all of this work, we needed two necessary elements: love and honesty.

Every couple faces times of stress and disagreement. We are two different personalities viewing the same situation or circumstance, which is why we always rely on the importance of love and honesty. The love is profound and the glue that binds us intimately to one another. In order for it to not be damaged, we learned that honesty was essential in all things. Through our life together we have learned that with love and honesty, true love and real honesty, anything can be worked out. That is not to say it is always easy, or sometimes painful, to be so very honest but it is what has kept our marriage strong.

We were taught to prioritize our time for our self, each other, the children and our work lives.

Many years ago Suzanne and I learned a practice that has kept us in good stead through all of these years of raising children and doing ministry, me in the church and her as a public teacher and speaker. Each week we started with a calendar for the week with 21 squares representing the seven days of the week, three blocks for each day of morning, afternoon and evening. We were taught to always choose one block for our self and two blocks for each other and blocks for commitments with the children before we added the blocks that we had to spend at work. If for any reason we have to miss our time together, we must exchange it with another block the same week.

These and other practices have been so important in that they have taught us commitment and intentionality and priorities. With deep love and respect for one another we have continued to grow ever more close to one another, and close to the God who dwells within our marriage.

With both of us in our 60’s, we don’t speak of the first or second half of life. Rather, as we live into this final third of life, it is our prayer that our marriage may reflect to all others the great love that God has for his children and the love that Jesus has for the church. It is with the grace and help of the Holy Spirit that we now continue forward always listening for the “next word of God” for us as a couple.