I roll over onto my back in our bed in which I now sleep alone and throw my arms wide in the middle of the night. It feels so good to lay like this . . . “like Jesus on the cross,” I think. “No,” I next think, “It’s NOTHING like Jesus on the cross.” For one thing, I can move and remove my arms. They aren’t nailed through the wrists to an old rugged cross until I die.

Once upon a time, my left arm would have come down smack dab hard onto Karen’s body, if not her face, depending on how she was laying there beside me in our queen sized beautiful brass bed, which she does no more these days. Karen doesn’t sleep beside me at all any more unless we’re in a KING SIZED bed in a luxury hotel room somewhere.

You see after forty two and a half years, my beautiful bride and I sleep in separate beds . . . separate bedrooms in fact.

It’s wonderful.

“When the kids move out,” my old friend once said, “you get your girlfriend back.”

I agreed, “And then your girlfriend gets a bedroom of her own,” I could have added.

Don’t feel bad for us, sometimes my girlfriend slips over from her bedroom across the hall, and I get to sleep with my girlfriend.

It feels naughty to say it like that . . . and also WONDERFUL. Sometimes . . . the way I see it . . . a little “naughty” is very, VERY nice!

I don’t blame my beautiful bride. Hell after forty two years, even I don’t want to sleep next to ME all the time.

But back to Jesus on the cross, that same old friend over thirty years ago told me that he was worried that if I went to law school Karen and I would eventually go our separate ways.

He and his wife had attended our wedding ten years before, and had become two of our closest friends. We’d had the children we each would have during the preceding decade and our lives had intermingled together. My friend had only voiced my own unspoken fear. I just looked at him for a moment or two and thought hard on what he’d just said, and then I said, “No . . . we HAVE Jesus.” My friend looked back at me, and he nodded his head.

The Good Book says, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

Amen.