It’s hard to believe it was thirty-five years ago today that Suzanne and I were married which joined our two families together. This journey has had way more than its fair share of ups and downs, but how did we get here?

After my daughter’s death, my wife Cindy developed cancer and she too died. This left me in Cissna Park with two sons, working in my new second profession, farming with my in-laws. With few friends in the area, I turned to an organization called Parents without Partners which was based in the Champaign / Urbana area. Hosting events regularly as a chance for people to socialize and talk about the challenges they face as single parents, became a good escape for me.

Enter Suzanne, a recently divorced single mom of two girls. Working for an art supply distributor in Urbana, she faced similar issues of raising kids and still trying to have some sort of social life, so she too joined the PWP group.

As the story goes, at the first event I attended, Suzanne either wasn’t paying attention or was involved in another conversation when I commented that I had an eight-teen-month-old son at home as she continued to interact with me. From there, over the course of the next few months, we developed a bond and even started dating.

As a back story, and how God’s hand was in all this, Suzanne has a friend who was a volunteer with hospice and earlier that year shared with Suzanne the distress she had over a young woman who, with two young sons, died from cancer. At some point in our dating, Suzanne asked her friend if she knew the name John Bruns. “How do you know that name” was the response, to which I’m sure there was more to their conversation than I still know to this day.

Knowing the odds were against us, (seventy percent of blended family marriages end in divorce) we decided to get married. Our vow to each other and to God was not to be one of those statistics. Although there were more challenges in this family than I could ever write about, our decision has brought us to this point of a loving and sharing marriage, thirty-five years later.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:4