Year after year Christians around the world celebrate Christmas by focusing on the story of the first Christmas as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew (1:18-25) and Luke (1:26-38; 2:1-20): the story of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus.  We concentrate on the same details each year: that Mary was a young woman, had not been intimate with any man, yet gave birth to Jesus as a result of God’s selection of her to be the mother of the Messiah, and that she gave birth to Jesus in a stable; and that Joseph was a carpenter by trade, kind hearted, a devout Jew, a good father to Jesus, and a very caring wife to Mary.  The purpose of this week’s article is to look at some aspects of Mary’s and Joseph’s lives less often written or talked about.

We do not know exactly how old Mary was. Read more…

Staff members at a local Starbucks I frequent for hot chocolate learned that my wife and I recently celebrated our sixtieth wedding anniversary.  They are all relatively young, and sixty years seems like a long time to them.  So they asked me to write about some of the things a couple has to do in order to make it together for that long. 

In this day and age when so many married couples find they are not a match for each other and call it quits, it is not surprising that today’s younger adults find sixty years of marriage to be very unusual.  When my wife and I were married, celebrating a fiftieth anniversary was hailed as the “golden” anniversary that everyone was in awe of.  The fiftieth anniversary is still very special.  But today many marriages bypass the golden anniversary, as well as the sixtieth, and it is not unheard of for people to celebrate seventy-five years together, or even longer.  So there are many others who are more qualified than I to write about what it takes to make a marriage work.  But I will share my thoughts about making a marriage a lasting relationship. Read more…