A man and his girlfriend were married. It was a large celebration. All of their friends and family came to see the lovely ceremony and to partake of the festivities and celebrations. All had a wonderful time. The bride was gorgeous in her white wedding gown and the groom was very dashing in his black tuxedo. Everyone could tell that the love they had for each other was true.

      A few months later, the wife came to the husband with a proposal, "I read in a magazine, a while ago, about how we can strengthen our marriage," she offered. "Each of us will write a list of the things that we find a bit annoying with the other person. Then, we can talk about how we can fix them together and make our lives happier together." The husband agreed. So each of them went to a separate room in the house and thought of the things that annoyed them about the other. They thought about this question for the rest of the day and wrote down what they came up with.     

      The next morning, at the breakfast table, they decided that they would go over their lists.

     "I'll start," offered the wife. She took out her list. It had many items on it, enough to fill 3 pages. In fact, as she started reading the list of the little annoyances, she noticed that tears were starting to appear in her husband's eyes.      "What's wrong?" she asked. "Nothing," the husband replied, "keep reading your list."    “The wife continued to read until she had read all three pages to her husband. She neatly placed her list on the table and folded her hands over the top of it." Now, you read your list and then we'll talk about the things on both of our lists," she said happily.

     Quietly the husband stated, "I don't have anything on my list. I think that you are perfect the way that you are. I don't want you to change anything for me. You are lovely and wonderful and I wouldn't want to try and change anything about you." 

The wife, touched by his honesty and the depth of his love for her and his acceptance of her, turned her head and wept.    

     In life, there are enough times when we are disappointed, depressed and annoyed. We don't really have to go looking for them. We have a wonderful world that is full of beauty, light and promise. Why waste time in this world looking for the bad, disappointing or annoying when we can look around us, and see the wondrous things before us?