Guess Who's Coming To Dinner

After senior night at tennis this evening, Doug and I flipped through the television channels to see if there was anything on that we wanted to watch.  He stopped on TCM as they were just getting ready to start one of his favorite movies, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."  As it had been several years since I had seen it and it had Sidney Poitier in it, I agreed to watching it with him.  I remembered the premise of the movie, but as the story unfolded there were key details that I had forgotten.  The longer we watched, the more I realized that the racial divide that the movie was famous for was no longer my focus.  It was nice to know that we have come a long way since the 1960s and the concern about inter-racial marriage definitely was not a big issue for our generation or our children's.  Instead all I kept saying to myself was "she's only 23, he's 37, they're getting married, moving to Geneva and they just met ten days ago."  The parent in me wanted to tell Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's characters to pull the plug on the whole idea and encourage their daughter to wait.  His race wasn't the issue.  It was the fact that they barely knew one another.

Once we stopped watching for the night, I spent quite a bit of time wondering what Doug and I would do in a situation such as that one.  In the end I realized that if Meg, Brett or Cal came home with the same scenario, I would only be able to make suggestions.  They have all reached adulthood and whom they chose to marry would be completely out of our control.  My hope would be that we have modeled for  them our beliefs on what makes a good marriage - love, compromise, communication, honesty and trust.  In addition I would pray that their newfound spouse would enjoy the company of our family as much as we do.   If all of this were true, who would I be to say that the Heinisch children could not find the perfect mate in ten days.