Years ago, my bride and I were read­ing through a book of evening devo­tion­als for mar­ried cou­ples called Night Light.  One chap­ter told the beau­ti­ful story of some kids who learned what a truly inti­mate mar­riage looked like by observ­ing their grandparents.

When they watched them together, they saw a cou­ple that was gen­tle with each other, truth­ful with each other, and car­ing for each other. They noticed how they looked at each other, and how they held hands.

This old cou­ple had a quirky tra­di­tion of leav­ing notes for each other in the most cre­ative places. They left them under pil­lows, inside toi­let paper rolls, in under­wear draw­ers, in the refrig­er­a­tor, and just about every­where else one could imagine.

Each note had the word “SHMILY” writ­ten on it. None of the kids had a clue what it meant.

Then, Grandma died, and all of the fam­ily gath­ered at the ser­vice to cel­e­brate her life. Grandpa approached the cas­ket, and gave the love of his life her last SHMILY. He then turned and shared the mean­ing behind this 50 year tradition.

See How Much I Love You.

SHMILY notes took just a few sec­onds a few times a week, but they made a huge dif­fer­ence over the years that didn’t end with this beau­ti­ful cou­ple. They impacted future gen­er­a­tions of their family.

And the power of the SHMILY tra­di­tion did not stop there. My bride and I embraced it, and we have shared it with many other couples.

Tra­di­tions can be a won­der­ful reminder in our lives of what mat­ters most.

For us, SHMILY has become a mean­ing­ful reminder. We have also added YAMBF and YAML.

How about you?

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Tags: Love, Marriage, Tradition

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 7:59 am and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.