If you’re traveling in Tunisia, be advised about the roads. You’ll be driving down a promising thoroughfare with a destination in mind, when suddenly the road dead-ends. Often one of the locals along the street will oblige you with a heads-up, calling out to your car in French: “Impasse!”

In 1953, James Hodge sat behind Louise in an economics class at Bob Jones University and noticed how beautiful she was. He asked her out, but the only dates he could afford were free campus events. To his delight, “she fell in love with me, even though I was poor as a church mouse,” he said. When Louise graduated from college, they married one Friday in June 1955. Unable to afford a honeymoon, they went back to work the following Monday. 

Lauris Shepherd was serving in the Army and stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia when he first discovered the Navigators, an interdenominational Christian discipleship ministry. Later he reconnected with the group after moving to San Diego to teach math at Point Loma Nazarene University.

David and Ruth Daumer celebrated their 40th anniversary this year on Jan. 6. They almost didn’t make it: David had a heart attack in 1996 at their older daughter’s 7th birthday party. She and her 1-year-old sister had to say goodbye to their dad in case he didn’t make it home from the hospital.

David and Ruth met when they were children in Hammond, Ind. They lost track of each other during high school but reconnected at a singles event during college. Their first date was a trip to the circus (“a good metaphor for our marriage,” said Ruth). Five months later they were engaged. 

I’ve been watching, from an appropriate distance, the collapse of still another marriage. Neither the husband nor the wife thinks there’s any future. They’ve tried hard, they say, and they’ve listened to all sorts of counsel from pastors, therapists, friends, and family. But their motivation has vanished.

In 1986, Hal Higley found a letter addressed to his wife in the mail. When he asked Kathi, she said it was from a friend in Louisiana, but their strained marriage had left him suspicious. Later, as they put their three kids in the car to go to dinner, Hal slipped inside to search for the letter and found it hidden in a drawer. When he read it, he said, his “whole world fell apart.” The letter was from another man.

Four years after they married in 1954, Charlotte and Dick Griffiths moved to the jungle of Indonesia to translate the Bible into the Hatam language. Living among the isolated tribe intensified normal marriage stresses but also brought them closer to each other and to God. Dick, now 90, has mild dementia, but Charlotte remembers both hard times and good times.