A Husband's Love

Murray loves me.

My husband Murray doesn’t like putting things together—furniture, other “needs assembly” things for the house. He can do it, but it doesn’t come easy to him, and it frustrates him.

Recently, I said, out of the blue, “I wish I had an exercise bike.” Then I forgot about it.

Until one day our neighbor knocked on the door and told me a truck had just dropped off a box for us that said, “Exercise Bike.”

That job went a lot better than Murray thought it would, and in just a couple evenings, I had my new bike set up in the living room.

I call it Charger, and I’ve been pretty good about riding it almost every day for seven weeks now.

Murray was encouraged by the bike, so he agreed to get me a porch swing. That didn’t go quite as smoothly.

When he opened the box Murray said, “There’s at least a hundred parts.”

I didn’t think so, but as I stood by him as he put it together, I decided he was right.

“I’m helping,” I said. Mostly I held tools and washers and other parts while he worked, or picked up things that fell. He could have done it without me there, but I said, “I’m here to encourage you.”

Just putting the frame together was the first session. It’s amazing to me how many parts there are in just the outside frame.

But that went okay, so Murray thought surely it wouldn’t be hard to get the seat together.

Right.

Again, a lot of parts and quite a bit of time, but finally it was done.

When Murray said, “I did this a hundred percent wrong. I’ll have to do it completely over,” I thought surely not.

We had both the seat and the backrest on backwards.

We took a break from it the rest of that day.

Murray started the next day with excitement. “This is going to be easy.” And it did seem to go a lot faster this time. “I’ve learned how to do it better since I’ve already done it once.”

Finally the seat was ready to hang. Except …

Murray went through everything in the box multiple times. The springs that connected the seat to the frame were not included.

So we had to wait almost a week for the company to send us the springs. Putting the final parts together took less than three minutes.

Who would go through something like this unless he loved me?

Of course, this isn’t a surprise. We’ve been married almost twenty-nine years, and I have many memories to show me that Murray loves me.

A memory that probably touches me the most was how, when I spent six weeks in the hospital after an accident a few years ago, Murray came every day and spent almost the entire day with me. And not because he didn’t have anything else to do.

I’ll never be able to explain to him what an amazing difference this made to that experience for me.

Sure, we have disagreements. We’re two very different people. But I pray that every time I sit in my new porch swing, I remember that I have it, not because it was easy, but because Murray loves me.