Later this week, Brenda will turn 60. I’ve been in love with her for 40 years.
The Early Years
I knew her when she was a Hall of Fame volleyball player and a church youth group girl. I was there when she worked her way through a private Christian university without financial support and before the days of scholarships. Did you know she worked the counter at Arby’s? Did you know she drove a mail truck delivering letters and packages? Did you know she cleaned dormitory toilets? Did you know she washed her bedsheets in her dorm room sink because she didn’t have 35 cents to use the washing machine? Did you know she completed her baccalaureate degree in three years to avoid the cost of a fourth year? Did you know she worked following our marriage to put me through graduate school? Did you know the list of male admirers was long…very long?
I lived with her when she was an elementary school teacher and later a young mother. I watched her fill multiple rusted out and barely running minivans with her four children and their friends. I’ve listened to her teach her children Bible stories, Christian hymns, and memory verses. I saw her prepare lesson plans and give nearly 45 years of education to our four children in our homeschool setting.
She lay in my arms following her first miscarriage and the second one too. When Brenda was in her 20s, I held her when her young, decades long, stroke-disabled mom died. I’ve watched her care for so many struggling teen girls, impoverished women, single mothers, and ladies who need help. She’s fed their children, washed their clothes, listened to their heartaches, comforted them with Scripture, prayed with them and for them, and created list after list of tasks to accomplish for others in need. In her mid-20s, I saw her scrape together $500 to give anonymously to a female college student who couldn’t pay her school bill. Her hand was rarely full but always open.
No one can stretch a dollar farther. I have a friend whose annual income is well beyond the national average for college educated men. To his wife he said, “If Brenda VerWay managed our money, we’d be multi-millionaires.” Her garage sales have paid our property taxes, sent children to summer camp, and covered bills of extended family members.
The Later Years
For more than 35 of her 60 years, she has been a mother, and a great one too. In the last seven years that she has been a grandmother, I have a new saying. “Brenda is an amazing mother, but God made her to be a grandmother.” She loves children, her own and the children of our church. For the last 25 years, our church children have learned at her knee, and our families and our church are better for it.
She wears cheaters now because her eyes do not have the same sparkle they did years ago. On occasion, she will make a comment about her hair or her hands. Time has changed them too. She is the embodiment of Proverbs 31:30, “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”
I still think she’s incredibly beautiful and am glad I figured out how to get to the head of the line, but her true beauty is internal; her true beauty is spiritual. I would not want my daughters or the women of our church to be exactly like her (because they are not her), but I pray to the Lord that they emulate her in as many ways as possible. I pray to the Lord that my grandsons and the single males in our church find a woman like her.
The saying offers, “Never ask a woman her age.” Overall, that’s good advice, but I’ll tell you how old she is. She’s old enough to have walked with the Lord for a long time, to have raised a godly heritage after her, and to see her grandchildren (Psalm 128:5-6). And she’s young enough to keep serving the Lord, love her husband, care for her children and grandchildren, and set the pace for other women to follow.
I am the most blessed of men.
As always, thanks for reading, and I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.