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Senior Correspondent

I watched the movie “The Vow” recently. The reviews call it a romance. Sure, it is. But it is also a lesson about life.

The story is based on a true story about a couple who is in an accident. After waking from a coma, the wife has no memory of her life with her husband. Her last memory is from before she leaves her family home and her then fiancé. She does not remember meeting her husband — let alone being married to him.

This film made me think about marriage as a whole. Husbands and wives take seriously their vows that marriage is forever. They work at it. The key word is work. Nothing is easy about holding together a marriage under relatively normal circumstances — let alone when one member of the marriage does not remember the other.

Back to the film — eventually the wife discovers that she left her old life because she found out her father had an affair. Here is what I found to be one of the wonders of the movie: the mother doesn’t give up on her marriage. She forgives her husband and they get on with their lives. She chooses to love. She does not consider infidelity to be the unforgivable sin that will break their vow of forever.

Now, of course, in God’s eyes there are no unforgivable sins. We are “only human.” Even still, if we start out considering marriage to be forever then it seems to me that we must do everything we can to keep on with it. We must choose to forgive first and to always choose love.

It can be done, and I know from personal experience. My husband was unfaithful. Yet, I chose to forgive. We worked things out, and at his death we’d been married for nearly 45 years. Yes indeed…it can be done.

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