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A couple months ago, we celebrated a milestone birthday for my husband. I knew there was no way I could actually pull off a surprise birthday party. So I decided to basically tell him that yes, we were going to have a party, he needed to let me know who to invite. However, secretly, I was planning the biggest surprise I have ever undertaken since knowing him.

Each night, once our kids were in bed and the house was actually quiet enough for one to think, I would type away at on my laptop. I started contacting my husband’s family and friends as far back as his first day of kindergarten, asking them to share memories, pictures, or whatever they wanted to share about my husband in honor of his birthday. When I first came up with the idea, I figure it would take some work on my part, but I could handle that. What I had not expected was just how hard it would be on me to keep the secret from my husband.

The night of his party I finally gave my husband a large box containing all of the letters and pictures I collected. Later that evening, while talking with guests my husband put his arm around me and said, “I think the best gift of all this is what Beth said about trying hiding all this from me. She said it was the hardest thing for her because she realized how much we share with each other.”

After years of being together, sharing the many ins and outs of daily life, sometimes it’s easy to overlook one of the important elements of a strong marriage, being a team. It has become such a part of who we are as a couple, my husband and I don’t always notice how much of a team we have become. Those couple of months while planning my husband’s surprise gift, I became acutely aware of how much of a team we are. If I had mentioned to him any of the stories or people with whom I was chatting, he would have known something was up. So often, I had to bite my lip from sharing about the conversations I had with his friends and family. In the process of giving him a special birthday gift, I was also given the precious gift of recognizing a strength within us I had not noticed in a while.