My parents, Kim and Margaret Coutts, have been married 50 years this month, a milestone that only 5% of American marriages achieve. They have extraordinary lives, worth writing about.
My dad was serving as a pharmacist at a military hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey when a fellow officer knocked on his door and asked, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?”
My dad was irritated – angry, even – but couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was just one of many instances in their early adulthood when God inserted Himself into their story, and it wasn’t much longer before they turned their lives over to Him. It wasn’t a flippant decision. It was the beginning of an entire re-orientation of their priorities.
About four years later, my mom and dad attended a missions conference at First Baptist Church in San Jose – the one whose foyer boasted the spiral ramp that surrounded the two-story fountain. When the speaker gave a challenge, while the background music played, they walked forward to the altar to offer their lives in missionary service.
They spent almost a decade of service in missions in Liberia and Ethiopia, despite my mom crying every single day for the first six months. It was a sacrifice: her own mother refused to write or speak to her for the entire first two years. My mom taught elementary school, and my dad served as head pharmacist at ELWA Hospital, then as hospital administrator.
The year we returned, while still working as chief pharmacist at Kaiser, my dad went on to revolutionize the missions program at Hillside Church in San Jose. He started the partnership with Tanzania that changed the course of my life and dozens of others. He began a missions prayer ministry that has continued for three decades. He led numerous other short-term trips and developed several other overseas partnerships.
Meanwhile, while my mom taught kindergarten, she launched a ministry in the low-income neighborhood down the street from our church. Thirty years later, that ministry has flourished and is thriving. My mom invested in scores of children in that neighborhood, including taking in two of them for several of their college years, enveloping them as surrogate daughters.
My parents have done some big things in their 50 years of marriage. But what strikes me the most is how they have been faithful in the little things, the things that most people don’t see.