Prove It!

I have been married for twenty-nine years. That sounds like such a long time. Fortunately, it hasn’t felt like twenty-nine years.

Just recently, I had to prove my marriage. My husband’s insurance was doing an audit, so they were getting very picky about paperwork. We had to provide original birth certificates for each of our kids. Then, we needed to prove that we were married.

My husband starting bugging me about this long before the paperwork was due. Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it, I told him. I was in the midst of helping my son with all the paperwork he needed to do for college. This wasn’t a big deal. I’ve been married for twenty-nine years. How can they even question that?

Time marched on ahead of me and I hadn’t gotten the paperwork to prove we were married. In my mind, we’ve been married for twenty-nine years. All of our taxes have been filed for the last twenty-nine years, as married, filing jointly. Every piece of important paper in our house, had my married name on it. I’ve been on my husband’s insurance for twenty years. How could these even be a question?

But it was a question. We needed to prove we were married. I finally, downloaded some paperwork off the internet and sent in fifteen dollars to pay for a copy of our marriage certificate. I was kind of cutting it close, filing three weeks before it was due. But I knew I was married, so what’s the big deal?

Two weeks after requesting a copy of our marriage certificate, I received an envelope from San Diego County. This was a week and half before the paperwork was due. The envelope was a little thicker than regular letters. I smiled. I knew it was because it contained my marriage certificate. I tore open the envelope to find a form letter in there. “We have searched for a marriage certificate under the names you provided for us. We cannot find a marriage certificate for those names on that day. We used the fifteen dollars to conduct the search. Thank you for your time.”

Wait, what?! But I’m married. How can they not find my marriage certificate? I got married in San Diego county. What’s going on here? I called them. The woman on the phone asked me where I was living at the time I got married. I told her Los Angeles County. She told me I needed to request the marriage certificate from that county, not the county I got married in. That’s where my marriage certificate would be filed.

Now it was crunch time. I had ten days until the deadline before the paperwork was due. I looked up the address for county records for L.A. county, wrote down the address, then ran out the door to get in there before the office closed. I got to the records building, ran up the long steps, and asked a security guard where to go. He pointed me in the direction of a row of computers. I touched the screen, and filled out the request for a marriage certificate. Once I filled out the form on the computer, I had to go to the window to pay. I got in a line of about five people ahead of me. I secretly hoped they were all part of the same group, so I wouldn’t have to stand in line all day. When I finally got to the window I asked the woman if there was a way to do this quickly. She asked me when I was married. She said no, they couldn’t do rush jobs on anything before 1995. I was married in 1989. She said it would take three weeks to get it.

I left, defeated. I was married. I have been married for twenty-nine years. Why is this even a question? But it was a question. Even though I was married and had been married for twenty-nine years, if I couldn’t prove it to them through a copy of a marriage certificate, I would be dropped from my husband’s insurance. Yikes.

I broke the news to my husband when he got home that day. He said he would call them to see if there was any other way we could prove we were married, besides a copy of a marriage certificate. He came home the next day and said, we could email copies of our taxes and anything else with my married name on it and then they would look it over. I did that immediately. A few days later, they said they never got the email. I emailed them again, with a copy of our taxes, an insurance card with my married name on it and a copy of my daughter’s birth certificate with my maiden name on it and my married name.

After that, a few days later, I got an email, telling me they accepted the paperwork we had sent them and I wouldn’t be dropped from our insurance. Whew!

I’m so glad God’s got my name written down in the Book of Life. I’ve been a Christian for a long time, but I don’t have to prove it to God. I am His. My name’s written down. I don’t need to prove anything. It’s been filed with God.