Today I dug deep in the trunk and pulled out the album.

The cover is age-blemished. Pages yellowing. The cards are fragile, antiquated. The inked signatures, along with the love and best wishes, are fading.

On this day, forty years ago, my dress was ready and hanging on the closet door. My mother paid $130 for it and repaired the uneven hem. We’d found a cathedral bridal cap on the clearance rack, the price reduced because the pearl beading was coming off—she bought that, too, and restitched the tiny beads.

When Grandma offered to pay for the wedding cake, my mother wept.

My mother-in-law had new carpet installed in her home just prior to hosting the rehearsal dinner. She made spaghetti. A widow of eleven years, she’d given her engagement ring to her boy, to give to me. She cried on the morning of our wedding because it was raining, but the sun broke through the clouds in all its summer glory before the ceremony. The following spring, she would remarry.

My father asked a coworker, an amateur photographer, to take pictures. Our next-door neighbor, whose three kids my mother babysat for years, hosted my shower and provided the refreshments for the reception.

My grandmother asked her sister to stay with my grandfather, who was ailing and not up to traveling three hours in a car (cancer would make itself known and his bladder would be removed; he would live another fourteen years). Grandma was determined to be there. One of my most treasured photos from that day is of her seated on a pew alongside my Grannie and my mother, all of them smiling, wearing matching white carnation corsages.

My mother made the four ocean-blue bridesmaid’s dresses; my sister and new sister-in-law were radiant in them. Mom also made my sky blue going-away outfit and, at the last minute, removed her white beads and put them around my neck. The final photos in my wedding album are of her in her handmade pink dress, minus the beads, watching me leave, and my father standing in his black tails and striped ascot, grinning from ear to ear, a big cigar clenched in his teeth (congrats, Daddy; your eldest is safely handed off, not your responsibility anymore).

I was twenty years old.

I loved them all. I knew they loved me.

My family.

Forty years later, I remember them, despite the unraveling. The irreparable rifts. Death, loss, mental illness, addiction, estrangement, falling away… the story is surreal. Nightmarish. Like something from Picasso’s blue period with Van Gogh’s cypresses lurking in the foreground.

But on that bright day, we were together, celebrating. I read every faded, fragile card and my own handwritten record of the events. So much hope and joy, all there, preserved. For a few moments I linger in the vibrance, the whole wide circle of family love, everything that culminated in this new beginning. I remember my mother’s sacrifices especially.

And so the prologue ended. There are pangs, yes. Shatterings and shards in the heart. But the love is there. Still there. Despite all.

I poured my life into chapters that wrote themselves across the four subsequent decades, into the husband, the ministry, the children and now grandchildren, that God has granted me. As my husband said in the CICU to our oldest son, after regaining conscious from induced hypothermia, recovering from his first heart attack, cardiac arrest, and surgery: I have poured everything I have into you.

Duty. Sacrifice. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.

And so I made my vow, not only to a once-young man but to God, who loves with a steadfast love, from everlasting to everlasting.

Today my dress is ready and hanging on the closet door. Ivory with lace sleeves. Not new, but it’ll work. Tomorrow our family—our sons, daughters-in-law, granddaughters—will gather to celebrate this milestone with us.

I shall tell them, as best I can, that they’re infinitely more than what I dreamed of when I first set my satin-slippered foot on this path, forty years ago. Gifts beyond compare. Love multiplied, exponentially.

Straight from the hand of my Lord, who makes all things new.

I close my album.

with special thanks to the insightful band of Spiritual Journey writers and to this month’s host, Leigh Anne Eck, who chose the topic of “family.”