How Deep is Your Love?

On this Valentines Day, I am feeling very blessed. It does not escape my notice that I have been very blessed indeed. My husband and I have been married for almost sixteen years. We have been together for twenty one. We met our senior year in high school.

I was this skinny girl with the big eighties hair. I went to school and then went to work at the mall. I spent my entire check on clothes at the "cool" store in the mall and gas to get to work and back. I was neither too pretty or too ugly and I was far from popular. I also had the worst self esteem, which I'm trying to this day to outgrow.

He was this cute brown haired, puppy dog brown eyed guy. He was neither too tall or too short. He was just the right height for a short girl like me and his eyes were nothing short of dreamy. They still are. I remember the night we met as clearly as if it were yesterday. I was friends with his next door neighbor. She was dating a friend of his. They invited us over on the same night. He almost didn't show. I am so glad he did. To this day I have no idea where her parents were. We sat around in awkward silence drinking Coke and playing with these little pink plastic bugs that would jump whenever you pushed on their bottoms. My friend and her boyfriend left to go pick up a pizza leaving us there alone to talk. We talked and I always say when he flipped the pink plastic bug into my coke I knew. I waited days for him to call me and ask me out. He eventually did and him spilling water on me and me singing in the car to Janie's Got a Gun didn't scare either of us off.

I remember the first kiss. The first kiss that ever took my breath away. The kind that you feel all the way down to your toes. Our first Valentine's Day he was taking a class at the local college. The snow totals were accumulating and yet he didn't go home after class. He trecked to my house to bring me flowers, candy, and card. My mother loved him. I have always said and still believe to this day that they would trade me for him any day of the week and twice on Sunday. He used to write me poems and love letters. When we were in college they came in the mail regularly. We would write of our hopes and our dreams and how one day we would get married and the waiting would be worth it.

It was. We were together five years before we married. Finishing college was the best decision we made. As we go into this day after all these years we realize that every day is a gift. We know that each day not just Valentine's day is cause for celebration. We were in the store last week and picked out cards for each other. We read them then put them back on the shelf. We used the card money to buy a soft drink in the check out line. I've had the big gesture. Actually if you think about it, I'm living the big gesture. I'm married to the most amazing husband and father. If I knew nothing else other than the fact that he would one day become the father to our children that he is today, it would have been enough.

Isn't that how true love works afterall? My Heavenly Father reminds me daily that with great sacrifice comes great reward. I still have every letter and poem from those early years. I still have the pink plastic bug that he flipped into my Coke too. Those were the beginnings of our love, the greatest gesture however, is in the sticking it out arm in arm up the hills and down the valleys of life. So I guess when the song says "How deep is your love?" I'd have to reply with another great song that says "There ain't no mountain high enough."