We met in August 2013, fell in love at first sight and married before God a week later. Our formal public wedding came later, in 2015, when we invited family to celebrate a union we had already made. We did not need a committee to tell us we recognized one another. We recognized one another and got married. That is the beginning of the Trott Bailey Family as a married household.

In the years after, we found something that made our love more interesting than a single beautiful honeymoon. We could both keep changing without leaving each other behind. A new machine gave me a different set of skills to master. Sher opened another line of publishing, design or business development. Every season placed a new person in front of the other spouse, and each new person was still the husband or wife we adored. Renewable energy had become renewable love.

When we travelled to California around the time of our formal wedding, we went to learn. We visited Palo Alto, encountered the extraordinary concentration of American technology and took in the habits of a country that had learned to export its cultural imagination. We watched Intel and the technology world with the same appetite we brought to the robotic workshop. We also watched HGTV. The Caribbean had grown up consuming American television, and those renovation shows taught the world what a house should look like, how much it should cost and what counted as success. Sher and I began asking whether a house that looked glamorous on camera actually made family life easy, durable and delightful.

Our relationship with God deepened alongside the work. We prayed seriously, listened, argued with ourselves, and came to believe that Jesus had called us to a form of wealth that no existing national accounting system had yet learned to describe. We began speaking about becoming the world’s wealthiest family long before the ordinary measurements of money would have made such a declaration popular. Our confidence in God released us to explore things outside the boundaries of economic feasibility.

One of our finest decisions was to stay beside each other. I have not spent our marriage arriving home late to find a sleeping wife and children. We work in each other’s company. We go to the water, discuss food and software, learn languages, argue over measurements, laugh and raise children within sight of the work. Our family life keeps producing ideas because our family life has room for us to inhabit it.