Marriage - How to Last for Fifty Years

Joyce & Dwayne Walker 50 years
June 18, 1966 - June 18, 2016

Joyce and Dwayne Walker and the Providence of God

What is providence? It’s that theological word that means God controls all contingencies, all circumstances, all choices, all events, all people, all time to converge to precisely fulfill His will.  One of the best verses in the Bible that describes providence is familiar to most of us, Romans 8:28.  And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.  Often, we are caught up in the ‘daily-ness’ of life and forget about the providence of God as events occur.  Permit me to share a few highlights from the last fifty plus years in which God’s providence was at work in our lives.

September 30, 1964, a day that will live in infamy; well, at least it will live in my memory.  For it was that day that I met the lady who would be the love of my life.  It was a most unusual blind date arranged by my roommate who was also dating a nursing student attending OBU nursing school.  

First date was a coke at Split-T, second date was a movie, and third date was the State Fair.  After a rocky courtship of over one and one-half years, I popped the question and she said yes.  We scheduled our wedding for five months or so.  However, on the second Sunday of June, 1966, we decided to get married the following Saturday, June 18.  Her parents weren’t sure that they could come on such short notice but they did along with twenty or so other acquaintances and friends.  Joyce made her own wedding dress in less than a week and we honey-mooned for one night at the Cinderella motel in Shawnee.  Real honeymoon was two months later and included Six Flags over Texas (nothing but the best for the Walkers) and visiting relatives in Texas and Colorado including Joyce’s parents in Denver.

We lived in a small one bedroom apartment for $65 per month.  Joyce was working as an RN and I was an assistance manager for a finance company.  Less than a year later, I was promoted to a branch manager and we were transferred to Pasadena, TX.  That lasted five months and we moved back to OKC and I took another job and Joyce returned to her job at Presbyterian Hospital.  Fast forward to 1970.  I was terminated from my job because I was “too nice” and told to look outside of the finance industry for my career.  I enrolled in a tech school and took full-time training for seven months in the field of computer programming.  I later completed my bachelor’s degree using the GI bill and subsequently obtained a master’s degree in 1985.  One of Joyce’s nursing instructors prior to her graduating from nursing school told her that our marriage would never last because she had a degree and I didn’t.  Guess we showed her!

We purchased our first home in Warr Acres in 1971 wondering how we could afford the $170 per month payments.  We both wanted children and went through numerous tests that were inconclusive so we began investigating the adoption process.  During this period, one of the doctors at Presbyterian found out that we were interested in adopting and subsequently had a newborn available in October, 1972.  Mike was born premature and spent 29 days in the hospital and we brought him home on November 3, 1972.  My career in IT was progressing nicely and included a few job changes along the way.  Joyce was either working full-time, part-time, or not at all, still at Presbyterian.  We received a call in December, 1975 from the husband of one of Joyce’s fellow nurses.  He was an attorney and the possibility had arisen that he might have a ten-month old girl available for adoption and wanted to know if we would be interested.  DUH!  The next day, he brought Sheri to our house with a grocery sack containing all of her worldly possessions.

Joyce has been the ultimate homemaker and the world’s best cook.  She could also sew, knit, crochet, and every other homemaking skill you can think of.  She made great outfits for both Mike and Sheri over the years and even made matching leisure suits one year for Mike and me. 

We were both raised in the country and began looking at moving to an acreage.  In 1979, we bought a new house on an acreage between Newcastle and Tuttle and lived there until 1986.  Highlights definitely included our garden and my Troy-bilt rototiller.  I bought Mike a used home-made go-cart and he rode it almost as much as I worked on it.  We enjoyed everything about country living except for having to drive so far to work, to the grocery, to church, etc.

During the early years of our life together, we attended Mayfair Baptist Church and were very active.  Little did we know that we were merely skimming the surface of what the Christian life was all about.  We began attending Metropolitan Baptist Church just before moving to the country and one of the elders was Russ McKnight.  We began attending his Friday night Bible study on the book of Romans.  We had never really encountered expository teaching and the doctrines of sovereign grace.  It turned our lives upside down but only for the better.  In June 1981, we began attending Faith Bible Church even though it was 40 miles away.  During the next six years, we tried other churches on occasion that were closer to our home but we always returned to FBC.  I had started working on my MBA in 1980 and the time was fast approaching when my credit hours would be lost so I decided to finish my degree at night at UCO.  Right, Edmond again.  I also began working as a sub-contract programmer for an ex-IBMer who lived in, you guessed it, Edmond.

We listed our country home but the real estate market was very slow back then.  We decided to move to Edmond anyway, figuring we’d save a ton of money on gas.  We leased a house but a year later we still had not sold our country home and were broke after making a house payment and lease payment for a year so we moved back to the country.  During that year in Edmond, a tornado hit our neighborhood in May (we were in the closet praying – missed our house by about two blocks) and in August, the Patrick Sherrill rampage birthed the “going postal” phrase as he murdered thirteen people at the Edmond post office.  Maybe Edmond wasn’t the place for us.  We subsequently sold our country house six months later and moved back to Edmond and have lived here ever since.

Joyce and I had both made a profession of faith and had been baptized in our early years.  After sitting under the Bible teaching of Russ McKnight, we both realized that we were living under a false profession and were not really believers in Christ.  Neither of us know the exact moment that we were regenerated by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, but it was between 1981 and 1990 and we were both baptized again by Russ McKnight.  Two quotes from Russ have stuck with me over the years and sum up my theology.  “All That God Requires, He Provides” and “All of Salvation is All of God”.  Russ brought the words of scripture alive to both of us and taught us that it is all about God, not all about us.  Russ passed away from cancer in 1992 and I still miss him.  He was my teacher, mentor, friend, and kindred spirit.  See your soon, Russ.

We continued at FBC for 24 of the next 29 years and came to Heritage in 2010.  Joyce has had several major surgeries over the years and I have had two knee replacements.  During our marriage, we have experienced the loss of my sister, my brother, my mother, and both of Joyce’s parents.  Through all of this, God has remained faithful and sustained us with his love, mercy, grace and comfort.

I retired in August, 2006 and Joyce retired in June, 2012.  My main hobby is golf and I have shot from 80 to 108 during the last year but it gets me out of the house.  Joyce and I spend time every day studying the Bible and praying together.  Those are the most special times of our day.  We are both involved in various ministries and studies at the church and enjoy watching British mysteries on Netflix.

We were blessed with the birth of our granddaughter, Kaylee, in January 2002.  In April of last year, our immediate family expanded with our son Mike’s marriage to Jennifer which included two more blessings our step-grandsons, Andrew and Anthony.  In April of this year, our daughter Sheri married Nathan Martinez and they live in Altus. This event was definitely the providence of God and we wish for both of our children at least 50 years together.

We have done quite a bit of traveling since Joyce retired but I won’t bore you with the details. Highlights maybe.  2013 – Southeast US including my first trip to Florida.  Attended a Bible Expositors conference in Mobile, AL with John MacArthur and Steve Lawson, ate at Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, GA and spent two nights on Hilton Head Island.  2014 – PEI via Niagara Falls and  the Baseball Hall of Fame, and tours of Boston and Washington, DC on return trip.  2015 – California, Pacific NW, Alaska Cruise, and Glacier National Park.  Side trip to see Larry Busby who set up our initial blind date.

People might ask what is the secret of being married for 50 years?  Heck if I know!  Seriously, there have been ups and downs but many more ups than downs.  Years ago, a nephew wanted me to write something for his wedding since I wasn’t going to be able to attend.  I would like to share an except from what I wrote twenty-two years ago.  I believe it still applies today.  To summarize and paraphrase what I said follows:

Four Cs that contribute to a successful marriage. 

• Christ - unbelievers have (in my opinion) very little hope of a successful relationship because of their bent toward sin that can only be dealt with by the blood of Jesus Christ. Christ himself said "Repent or perish" and "You must be born again".  Sadly, the divorce rate in the church is about the same as the rest of the world.  You may love your mate with all that you are but if your heart of stone has not been turned into a heart of flesh by God's Holy Spirit, you will spend a lot of time rowing against the current.  Today is the day of salvation.
• Commitment - probably should be removed from the dictionary as it appears to have been removed from our society.  This is certainly the value missing from most marriages today.  "Til death do us part" has been modified to "Til something better comes along".  We get so bound up in feeling good that we tend to want to bail out at the first sign of trouble.  A real commitment is a conscious decision to stick it out when our feelings say to go.
• Communications - seems to be overused in the land of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, ad nauseum.  Communicating requires face-to-face time, not tweet to tweet or text to text.  Many years ago during some of our struggles, we participated in a group study in our home using the book "The Marriage Builder" by Larry Crabb.  I highly recommend it.  One exercise in the study included going into the bedroom with your spouse and both sitting on the bed facing one another and sharing some of your deepest struggles.  Listening is missing from our communications today.  We think if we are talking, that is communicating.  If no one is listening, you are wasting your time.
• Cherish - I understand it to be putting the other person first and never violating their dignity.  We place such a high value on them that we are always looking out for their good even to the point of denying ourselves, if necessary.  It might even require giving up some of our "rights" which probably seems un-American!  Marriage is not 50-50, it is 100-100.  Each partner is to give 100% to their mate expecting nothing in return.  This is true ministry.

In closing, I would be remiss to not mention our biggest addiction which we have shared for our entire married life.  It is Trixie, Trooper, Heidi, Mary Lou, Emmy Lou, Sammy, Charlie, and Molly, our dachshunds over the years.

I would like to close with the theme or our lives both now and forever.  It comes from the Protestant Reformation of the 1500’s.  It is known as the ‘five solas’.

Sola scriptura- By Scripture alone
Sola Fide- By faith alone
Sola gratia- By grace alone
Solus Christus- By Christ alone
Soli Deo gloria- Glory to God alone