All dressed up and somewhere to go

We got all dressed up to have our picture taken for the church directory. We were told that our photo would be edited — blemishes removed, facial lines softened, stray hair put properly in place. I was thinking, while the photographer had her pose for her picture alone, how pretty she was. "We've been married a year-and-a-half," I said to the photographer. "How did you meet?" she asked. "Online," my wife answered. The photographer paused then as we told the story — how we both lost spouses to cancer after long marriages; how I'd wandered then in the mountains journaling my adventures, posting them on a grief site, a page she frequented too, for the same reason as hundreds of thousands who also visit there; how our conversations began, how mutual were our dreams, how compatible we were; how all our lives, and now late in life, we believed God had orchestrated it all, had brought us together. "That is so sweet," the photographer said. "How very special." It is. "Too bad we're all dressed up with nowhere to go," I said to my wife as we left the church. But we did have somewhere to go. And when we arrived, there, greeting us, were a pair of daisies, a pair of petunias, a pair of chrysanthemums, a pair of black-eyed Susans. Like the two of us, all dressed up. Waiting. In our flower garden. For us to return home. David Anderson is a retired pastor who writes "to bring hope to people in crises, to bring encouragement to those who've loved much, lost much, and desire to experience the joy of living again."