in memory and celebration...

7 going on 67. That’s the goal anyway. What a crazy couple of months and what a wild year it has been. I spent the weekend celebrating the life of my grandmother Joy Olson. Below is a tribute that I wrote for my grams:

Joy, personified

The emotion of great delight or happiness,
caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying.
My grandmother was Joy, personified.

As a kid I experienced Joy through purchased Twinkies
and taboo candy jar exceptions.
As I grew older, it was escapes to Goshen
and unbridled cheers at plays, sport, and song.
She found it in 67 years of marriage
where its wonderful residue now clings to mine

Mother, wife, sister, friend and GG,
Grams gave joy with unquestionable grace;
perhaps a more suitable middle name than Constance.

Graceful from her golf swing to dress,
to handling gramps off-color quips,
finding it through heartbreaking times with her kids
and even holding grace as she grew closer to her passing.

My grandmother was Joy.
She was graceful.
Fitting then, that she now faces perfect joy and grace
eternally in the One who created joy incarnate.


Joy Olson with Avery Olson - July 2008

Funerals are always bittersweet as it was so great to be with my family and remember my grams, but it was also heart wrenching knowing the incredible grief my gramps was experiencing and still going through. My grams died at age 91. My grandparents had been happily married for 67 years. They have known each other since they were 10. How do you experience life with someone for 81 years and then just stop and be left on your own without them? I don’t know. I will be praying for my gramps.

I’m humbled by the legacy my grandparents left. Erin and I are so blessed to have them and our respective parents’ to model our own marriage after. Today we celebrate seven years. We survived the itch. I wrote this for Erin on our wedding day:

I would not tell you loved you,
thought true love could only reflect in Christ.
But you showed me my error and my truth.
It was not about me loving,
rather Christ loving through us.

So I pledge here before you, before Him,
to blindly fumble through my imperfections
and seek to love you through that perfect grace,
just as He loves us,

And I promise I will hurt, I promise I will fail
I promise I will fall, and I promise I will want to give up.
But I promise He will heal us, I promise He will lead us
He will pick us up and always prevail.

For I am but a single strand fraying in the friction,
strengthened by you, but still desperately fragile as two.
But how blessed are we to have that glorious third strand?
Running through our middles and pulling us taut as one.

How wonderful is it that because of Christ I can say
I love you Erin.
And a chord of three strands is not easily broken.

Those words became truer than I ever could have imagined. And while 7 years is like a tenth of 67, it has still been a long time and filled with joy, pain, and adventure. I wish I could take more credit for our celebration today, but the truth is all the credit goes to my incredibly amazing wife and unconditionally loving God. Funny, and appropriately selfish that I talked about Christ loving through ME seven years ago. I was blind to the fact that Erin would be the one to show God’s grace. Much like my grandmother, Erin’s character gushes with grace. Grace is defined as “unmerited favor.” I don’t deserve it from Erin and certainly not from Christ. Yet she forgives me. She forgives me when I’m not the man I promised to be. She forgives me when I do things that I really shouldn’t. See, she knows God has already gone there and atoned for my selfish screw-ups and she forgives me as He has, allowing Christ to love through HER. That’s grace. That’s love. It gives me hope. It requires my faith.

It took me seven years just to get that Erin. Thanks for your patience. But then again you already know I am developmentally delayed. I love you Erin. Let’s spend the next 60 years enjoying each other one day at a time.