51 1/2 Shades of Brown

What words or images come to mind when you think of marriage? Is it love, romance, stress, anger, failure, happiness, friendship, or something else? The correct answer is all the above. No two marriages will be the same. All marriages will reflect the hearts of the two people involved in it. Our story is about two flawed people with flawed circumstances who came together to create an extraor-dinary marriage masterpiece. Some people may prefer a romanticized fairytale story. Wayne and I can't offer you a fairytale. But we are here to encourage to you, get past the fairytale desire for princes on white horses and princesses in need of rescue and seek the kind of person you can make history with for a lifetime That is more satisfying than a fairytale.The people around us always comment on the wonderful marriage we seem to have. Our relationship canvas displays a picture of love, honor, and respect for each other. We often find ourselves saying "If you only knew how many messes we made along the way to this masterpiece on display." We were approaching our 25th Anniversary in January of 2017. In December of 2016, I (Laura) shared 25 little-known facts on Facebook about our marriage journey, one a day at a time, until January 4th, 2017. I was surprised at the number of people who commented and said this was the highlight of their day. If I was late posting, I would get messages inquir-ing about the absent post. I finally decided to schedule the messages so I would not forget or get harassed by my followers for being slow. Our friends encouraged Wayne and me to write a book including some those "not-so-perfect" tales of our marriage journey. It dawned on us that people wanted to see behind the curtains of this picture-perfect marriage. They wanted authenticity. We don't have the perfect marriage, if such a thing even exists, but we do have is built on love, trust, honor, and mutual respect and a sincere desire to reflect the image of God in our mar-riage. To paint the most vivid and authentic picture of our marriage, we selected 51 moments in our 28-year-long relationship we felt impacted us the most. These are stories of our successes and failures, victories and defeat, joy, and pain. Each moment comes with a "shade", which are our lessons learned. We used the hashtag to acknowledge social media's role in the crea-tion of the book. Each shade also encourages you to use various principles to create your own "shade" as you paint your marriage masterpiece. The 1/2 shade in-dicates our masterpiece is still a work in progress.Welcome to our life