Wedding Day Letter from God

I created each of you,

Even before you were formed, I knew you and I set you apart.  Then I placed each of you in your mother’s womb, with a plan and purpose, to give you hope and a future.  Your hearts have prayed, have sought and have found.  And today, you will become one.
                                                               One life, one love, one journey Home.

Never underestimate my power through your lives.  Your strength comes with unity - alone you were once easily overpowered, now together you will be able to defend yourselves, but a cord of three strands is not easily broken.  Keep Me at the center of your marriage and all that you do.  I will be your strong shield, your protector.  I, myself, will go before you and will be with.  I will never leave you nor forsake you.

Keep in mind that just as you are human, so is the one at your side.  Today your love for one another is welling up within you, but there will be times when each of you will fall short.  When discouragement and disappointment come, when it is hard to find the love that you feel so abundantly today - look to Me.  I am the Unchanging One, the One who will not fail you, my mercies never come to an end.  I am the Source and Provider of the love that you have.  I have instilled it as a gift into your heart when you found one another, I have grown it and made it what it is today.  And I have much more for you - a storehouse, an abundance of riches.  It is because I first loved you, so much as to give my only Son, that you are able and will continue to be able to love one another with the same sacrificial love.

The love you have found, when rooted in Me is a safe place.  You should keep no record of wrongs but always extend forgiveness and grace just as I have lavished it upon you.  Freely give as I have freely given to you.  If one of you should stray, may the other humbly and gently bring you back into my embrace.  In doing so, you will save each other from destruction and cover over a multitude of sins.

When troubles and hard times come, when your stretched thin and when my heart breaks at the sight of most others walking out, may you allow those times to bring you all the more closer - closer to one another and to Me.  I will be faithful to light your path.  I am the Creator of the wind and the waves, they obey my Voice and at my command I can calm any raging storm that you face.  Should I allow you to go through it, I will sustain you, I will comfort you and provide for you so long as you remain in Me.  There will also be temptations ahead, I am already there and I promise you that I have already provided a way out of each one.
I want you to understand fully that it does not take a house of gold to build a home.  It takes a strong, and firm foundation, one only I can help you build.  If you choose to build it any other way, it will blow like a tumbleweed in the wind or come crashing to the ground the moment it faces danger.  But build your home and your love upon Me and my teaching, a solid rock, then through the torrents of rain and floodwaters you will stand.  When others enter your home, be an extension of my hand toward them.  This will allow all who enter to experience My love overflowing from your hospitality into their very own lives.  Those who need me and that I send you way, can find Me through you.  Keep the doors of your home and your hearts open and I will have an open door ahead of you that no man can close.

Follow the path that leads to my eternal riches, there are inheritantly yours, they have been handed down from the generations before you.  From the fathers and mothers, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles, the pastors, the friends and the family that have loved you, have shed tears over you, have sacrificed their own wants for you and have stormed my gates in prayer over your lives and who will continue to do so.  May your life together be a life that outlives you both, one that takes on the likeness of Christ and hands the treasures you will find down to the next generation to come.

Remember this day that you are no longer two but now made one, a sacred union that has been bestowed upon you.  Do not take this miraculous occurrence for granted.  Do not compare this gift to others around you, instead keep your eyes steadily fixed on Me, embracing the unique love that I have so abundantly blessed you with.  Every step you take forward together should be a choice to lay yourselves down for the sake of love.  To set aside you own wants and desires to walk along the narrow path, leading to life, hand in hand.  May your love be one that stays right where it began, at the altar.  Never giving up on one another, always keeping your hearts tender toward each other and toward Me.

When you seek Me, you will find Me, when you seek Me will all your heart.  I will teach you My ways and keep your hearts undivided - bound together and also bound to Mine.  May your love be simple: simply grounded and rooted in My love, simple given and simply shared.

A love that soaks it in, every blessed moment, for better or worse until the day you’re called Home.

Be one another’s best friend.  Never give up.  Always look for the best.

Trust Me steadily, hope unswervingly and love extravagantly,
                                                                             God.

Gen 1:27, Psalm 129:13, Jere 29:11, Mark 10:8, Col 3:14, Ecc 4:12, Psalm 18:2, Deut 31:8, Rom 3:23, Psalm 136, Deut 31:8, Rom 3:23, Lam 3:22, John 15:9-16, 1 John 4:10-11, 1 John 4:16, Psalm 46:1 MSG, Col 2:7, Eph 3:17-18, 1 Cor 13:4-8, Eph 1:7-9 ESV, Matt 10:8, James 5:19-20, Psalm 119:105,  Matt 8:27, Psalm 18:35, 1 Cor 10:13, Luke 6:42, Psalm 127:1, 1 Th 3:12, Phil 1:9-11, Rev 3:8, Matt 6:20,  Eph 1:11, Psalm 100:5, Ex 20:6, Deut 6:6-9, Heb 12:2, John 15:13, Mark 8:34, Matt 7:14, Jere 29:12, Ez 11:19, Psalm 86:11, 1 Cor 13:13 MSG

Life to the Full

We spend so much wasted time trying to make a good name for ourselves.  In today’s world of technology almost anyone can do it, anyone can spread the word of who they are and why they feel they deserve to be recognized at the highest of standards.  It’s not hard to make a façade to present to a watching world while you hide in the magnitude of your sins.  Many are making a way for bigger and better, walking along the wide path that leads to destruction.  And what for?  The things along that path all fade away, they are all replaced one day by someone or something.  Maybe a few names get a monument or a plaque or a town named after them, but who were they?

I’m guilty of it too.  We’re all guilty of it.  I was once so busy trying to make a name ‘for God’ that I forgot the Jesus I was to be right here in my home.  I was focused on the “big” and the “meaningful” that I lost sight of what really mattered.  Because even in good works with the best of intentions we can veer of course.

It was only days ago that her and I talked about the everyday, little things that brought him to mind.  After months of him not being here it may finally be setting in.  But in those little messages back and forth throughout the weeks of times we’ve thought of him, found a note from him or just had to have a moment at the loss of him, we realized a little more about how to live.

He did things the world would claim as great, but he didn’t do them for the world.  He changed lives across the nation for Christ’s sake.  Every testimony that’s broadcasted almost daily of a life changed through Teen Challenge, brings the beginning work of his time and talent to mind.  A work that goes unrecognized and that continues to grow and be the work that guides the lost back to their Savior.  Countless ways and times he has set aside himself to follow the One he loved so dearly.

But what I remember of him wasn’t big or grand or across the nation: it was simple.  It was his big blue van faithfully picking me up to go for a visit to my childhood favorite place; his “old people hands” counting six toes on each foot; his lap holding me as we drew the silliest of pictures; the hours on end that he would let me pretend to be the teacher as I made up a classroom; the games and the rides and the walks.  As I became a teen it was his guidance my dad would go to; it was him who saw the change in my heart and made the trip to tell me how proud they were;  they were there every prom, every birthday, every day even as I grew.  His voice was the one who would call to check in; his heart was the one who really knew how his baby girl was;  his eyes were the old gray ones that would look to my husband and express how thankful he was for him; his frail arms would hold each of my babies, always reminding me of the five I wished for.

It was the simple, every day things that he did to pour out love to a child so much in need.

To me, he changed the world.  He changed my world.

So as she and I would go back and forth making our way through the grief of this man who has been there all our lives, we realized how necessary and important the every day,  seemingly mundane, simple acts of love are in this life.  It’s how we find life to the full.  We fill it every day with moments of  putting others first, of going out of our way to help another, of being content with being second, of making room for His glory through us, of bowing low to lift Him up high.   All these things done even when no one is watching, even if it’s only one life we change.  We find life to the full by filling it in every place He has us be.

When we find and live the life to the full that God has for us, it is then that our lives spill over long after we are gone.  

Count your blessings.  Bless Him through it all.
Live simply.  Love extravagantly.

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  John 10:10

Each Day At a Time

I prayed over his little self as he fell back asleep, the littlest one who turned his cheeks and glanced up at me before closing his blue eyes.  He looked just like he did the day I held him close in the hospital, brand new, breathing it all in with my heart overflowing over a year ago.  It seemed like yesterday.  He’s the third and with each one time just keeps going faster.  I can’t keep up with them and the days that seem, in the moment to drag on forever, are gone in the blink of an eye.   So I prayed, then I thought of not only him but all of them.

The blonde haired, freckle faced little “sister” who was the baby of the whole lot of us cousins will be putting on her white gown, holding her Daddy’s arm and walking down the aisle in just a few days.  The ones now driving.  The graduate.  The Navy boy.

And then there’s my own.  Knowing that our oldest only has a few more years of this curious, wild-eyed, boyhood left.  Our sweet little princess who just twirls and twirls in her dresses and still splashes in the puddles.  And our baby boy.  How does a Mama do it?  How does she take it all in and even then, how does she survive it?  How does she make it through raising them and how does she let go?

As I was reminded of my calling to these lives I counted the years left of school.   17 years of being their teacher ahead of me.  All those years to remain steadfast and strong, to teach and to mold and to help them become each their own.  The majority of my days for all those years to raise them to go out into the world as a light for Him. 

Who am I?

I ask the same words as Moses (Exodus 3:11).  Beg God to tell me who I am to have the honor and the privilege to grow and birth and raise three of His children.  In His love and grace, He gently reminds me of the very words my hand wrote on the red paper for the graduate:

 

“Never be afraid to fail, you are capable of so much more than you know.

And God is ABLE.

Remain rooted and grounded in Him.

Change the world pretty girl, one heart at a time.”

 

It’s not about who I am at all.  It’s about Who He Is.

As I imagined the day they will drive, graduate, marry, I echoed the words of my friend: “I’m not ready for that yet.”  You may be quick to tell me I have plenty of time to get ready, but I don’t.  Because none of those mama’s were ready for their babies to fly the nest.  It is by the absolute grace of God that they allow it.  The meltdown came with the thought of it all, the milestones, the memories, the inability to grasp it or even understand it, the time that seems like it may never get here and the same that I know is only moments away. 

But as the overwhelming weight of it all felt like it just might consume me, He reminded me of the words I heard the Farmer say to the Navy boy as they parted ways:

"We take each day as it comes, it’s all we can do."

Each day as it comes.  For the Navy boy leaving again after a short visit home, to go back to the call to serve his country, his family, his God. 

Each day as it comes.  For the Farmer driving his love back to their farm, to the comforts of home and simplicity.  Where he serves his country, his family, his God. 

 
Each day as it comes.  For this Mama going back to a house still full.  The glorious mundane, where I serve my country, my family, my God. 

 

Because it is all we can do. 

He is the Great I AM who knows the how behind the seemingly impossible.   We stay rooted and grounded in the One who is able, and we serve with His Love, flowing through us and into every life around us. 

We serve our country: by our willingness to sacrifice our lives and enlist or by the raising up right of the ones who will come after us.

 

We serve our family: by giving and loving and being a light through the likeness of Christ in our thoughts, motives, actions and prayers.

We serve our God: by laying down our own, temporary lives to walk in His eternal plan. 

 All by His Amazing Grace.

Each day at a time, one heart at a time.

 

 

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

2 Corinthians 12:9