I've Loved You for 1000 Years and I'll Love You for 1000 More
OUR LOVE STORY
So yes, I admit it. I am a huge Twilight fan. If your not... Don't stop reading... just bear with me for a minute because there is a great story to this song.
Indulge me for just a moment...
When I first read the books (and yes, I have read them twice) I loved them because they reminded me of dating my husband. You see, as I talked to friends reading the books and listened to their comments about how they wished their husbands were more like Edward I was thinking, my husband WAS exactly like Edward (minus the drinking blood drinking thing). Scott treated me like I was the most special person on the planet. I often caught him staring at me, he definitely over indulged me with lavish gifts, he loved how I smelled, he was so tender and protective, and in his own words, he could never get enough of me. Okay, so I know your gaging yourself right now, but as much as he was Edward, I was Bella. So not confident of myself, uncomfortable with the extra attention, but totally and completely devoted to him. Reading those books took me back to all of the reasons why I loved him. It was great for our marriage. So great that I even talked Scott into reading them to me. He would kill me for writing that!
Okay, the Twilight part is over, now the story behind the song....
So I loved the song 1000 years when it came out. Not just because of the movie, but because it was what we felt about our marriage. You see, I fell in love with my husband in 3rd grade. I knew I would marry him someday and wrote it in my journal repeatedly as I was growing up. He taught me swimming lessons when I was 11 and he was 14. When I was 14 and he was 17 I used to go to church dances only to see him. I would wait for his beautiful, sophisticated, older girlfriend to go to the bathroom so I could ask him to dance. I tried so hard to be grown up and Scott was always kind to me, but I knew that I was far too young to catch his eye. I always had the plan that after his mission I would got to his homecoming talk, he would notice that I had grown up, ask me out, and we would fall madly in love and get married. And... that's almost exactly how it happened. 3 dates and less than two weeks after he got home we were engaged. Absolutely crazy, right? Except that Scott has always thought all those year when I was just a little girl... Someday when she grows up, I need to ask her out. We both had know for a very long time that we were supposed to be together. We felt that we were promised to each other in Heaven before we came down here and that our love for each other was so strong that our spirits couldn't help but remember it. He called me his soulmate. So that song said everything we believed about our love from before, and as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints our beliefs about eternal marriage said everything about what the future of our marriage would be.
About a month before Scott died, he caught me crawling out of bed to go running and pulled me back next to him. He said,
"When we die and are in Heaven, do you know what I am going to do for the first 1000 years?" I was slightly annoyed that he was preventing me from going running so I sighed and indulged his question with a slightly irritated "what?" He said, "I'm just going to hold you." I rolled my eyes and replied, "I could never sit still for that long, I would go crazy!" Then I wiggled out of his arms and rushed off to go running. After he died, how I wished I could change my response that morning. I remember crying and saying out loud to him, "I take it back! You can hold me as long as you want and I won't complain one bit!"
"When we die and are in Heaven, do you know what I am going to do for the first 1000 years?" I was slightly annoyed that he was preventing me from going running so I sighed and indulged his question with a slightly irritated "what?" He said, "I'm just going to hold you." I rolled my eyes and replied, "I could never sit still for that long, I would go crazy!" Then I wiggled out of his arms and rushed off to go running. After he died, how I wished I could change my response that morning. I remember crying and saying out loud to him, "I take it back! You can hold me as long as you want and I won't complain one bit!"
Alex sang this song at the funeral because he felt compelled to do so. I didn't know how he was going to tie it in to the message that we were trying to convey and neither did he. He had nothing planned to say by a few words scribbled on a paper only minutes before he went up. Instead of telling the story in my words, I am including what Alex said that day and a copy of him singing the song. I hope you will feel touched by this story and that it will be an incentive for you to improve or to plan for a marriage like ours. It took a lot of work, but it was so worth it to have the 20 years of wonderful that I had with him here. I look forward to eternity with him in the future.
Here is Alex...
Before everyone of you came here to Earth, we lived in heaven with our Heavenly Father. We loved each other. Everyone one of us loved each other. We came to Earth, and we understood that we were going to forget a lot about that. But we all knew each other, every single one of us, including my dad, and he knew my mom. He knew my mom for a long time. We believe that we loved each other before we came to earth.
One of the things that God has provided for us are temples. I know a lot of you guys don’t know what temples are so I’m going to explain that. A temple is more than just a meeting house. It’s a place where we can go and special ordinances are performed, and they can’t be performed anywhere else. One of the ordinances we perform is called a sealing. A sealing is a special bond that is preformed when people are married, and my dad was sealed to my mom for time and all eternity. So they are married forever, and they still are today. Because of that, I’m sealed to my dad and I’m sealed to all of my siblings and to my grandparents...so I can feel them.
My dad was convinced he didn’t have a very good singing voice. By the way, that is not true. But for some reason he was convinced that I did. So he always wanted me to learn songs, and they sort of reflected the way that he felt about my mom. So I would be kind of his little puppet when he wanted to sing a song to my mom, because he didn’t. About 6 days before my dad died he sent me a text and he said, “ Alex, I want you to learn 1000 years by Christina Perrie.” And I said, “The song from the Twilight movie?” Well, he’s laughing right now, I can tell, because I went and learned the song.
He told me this song meant something special to us because not everyone believes that you can be sealed for all time and all eternity. Not everybody believes that we came from somewhere where we loved each other for 1000 years. So to say that we came from somewhere and that we loved someone for 1000 years and that we are going to love them for 1000 more is special to us.
I can cry when I sing this song because I’ll sound horrible. So okay now I’m going to sing the song....
One of the things that God has provided for us are temples. I know a lot of you guys don’t know what temples are so I’m going to explain that. A temple is more than just a meeting house. It’s a place where we can go and special ordinances are performed, and they can’t be performed anywhere else. One of the ordinances we perform is called a sealing. A sealing is a special bond that is preformed when people are married, and my dad was sealed to my mom for time and all eternity. So they are married forever, and they still are today. Because of that, I’m sealed to my dad and I’m sealed to all of my siblings and to my grandparents...so I can feel them.
My dad was convinced he didn’t have a very good singing voice. By the way, that is not true. But for some reason he was convinced that I did. So he always wanted me to learn songs, and they sort of reflected the way that he felt about my mom. So I would be kind of his little puppet when he wanted to sing a song to my mom, because he didn’t. About 6 days before my dad died he sent me a text and he said, “ Alex, I want you to learn 1000 years by Christina Perrie.” And I said, “The song from the Twilight movie?” Well, he’s laughing right now, I can tell, because I went and learned the song.
He told me this song meant something special to us because not everyone believes that you can be sealed for all time and all eternity. Not everybody believes that we came from somewhere where we loved each other for 1000 years. So to say that we came from somewhere and that we loved someone for 1000 years and that we are going to love them for 1000 more is special to us.
I can cry when I sing this song because I’ll sound horrible. So okay now I’m going to sing the song....
If you would like to know more about our beliefs about eternal marriage and temple sealings you can go to these links or talk to the Mormon Missionaries
(Alex is currently serving a 2 year mission in Chile)
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