This blog is about love, marriage, and enduring friendship. Sandy and Charlie Scott are one of my favorite married couples. A career committed to the medical health and welfare of the Burlington community children, they now enjoy retirement by playing golf, traveling, cooking, gardening, and spending sun filled days with family on Bald Head Island. Charlie is an avid beekeeper and jam maker, and Sandy, a prolific and renown portrait artist. What inspires me most about Sandy and Charlie is their deep love and devotion to one another. Approaching sixty years of marriage, they seem to share an intangible connection and mutual understanding of each other's well-being. Through health challenges and happier times, they live in the kind of intimate companionship that authenticates marriage. I am blessed with their friendship.
Sandy’s sweet disposition and warm smile make her a favorite among friends. As golfing buddies, we are positive and encouraging with each other’s game. We share a “tender hearted” nature that is sensitive to unkindness. Sandy is also a fellow traveler in our creative and spiritual journey through art. We paint to make people happy and to become closer to God. Her friendship is a treasure.
The Scotts' tulips were brilliant this spring and painting them was a pleasure. I have begun reading Kate Bowler’s new book, The Lives We Actually Have (Convergent Books, 2023). She offers blessings for both ordinary and extraordinary days. She writes in one blessing,
Blessed are we who desire to feel our hearts soar…with awe at the people right in front of us, with the beauty of the lily in its elegant purity, and the mystery and power of the tiniest seed, bursting to live as it was always destined to do. This world you made. It is irreducibly sublime. (p. 47)
Let us feel the wonder of love, friendship, and the blooming of new life. Let us wake up to the color of living. (pp. 52-53)
How is your heart? Mine is soaring.
