marriage

Yesterday, Ray and I celebrated 35 years of marriage. My good friend and fellow Tapestry blogger Gwynne Johnsons wrote on my Facebook, “Congratulations…got you beat by 15 years : ) :) ...Good guys are the BEST of God's gifts…” Amen to that!

I don't have anything fancy to say today.

Just a prayer request:

Take time today to pray for married couples. Meditate on Genesis 1:26-31; Genesis 2:21-24, I Corinthians 13:4-7 and Ephesians 5:15-33. Peruse the Song of Songs. And pray these things over your marriage (present or future), and the marriages of others that you know.

This post isn't about about the definition of marriage. There are plenty of blogs on that.

Today, it's about naked, needy defense. Those who choose to marry had better arm themselves.

I have to take this week to publicly praise my husband, Jonathan - my first ministry.

Jonathan, thank you for being a hero to me. Thank you for working hard to provide for us, and to make broken things heal. Thank you for letting me cry, and never despising my tears.

Thank you for consistently choosing to be on the same team with me, especially when I treat you like we're not.

This Saturday is Valentine's Day. Although I traditionally loathe the day because of its dubious commercial connections to rose, heart-shaped box, greeting card and chocolate companies, I do appreciate the dedicated time to romantic love.

I figure that if God can dedicate a heart-pounding book of the bible to sing the ultimate of songs (Song of Solomon), it's surely okay for us to have a love holiday.

But love holidays were always angsty and tormented for me, especially while I was in seminary. Ugh.

Do you, like me, often feel you are on information overload?  Between texting,emailing, surfing and living I declare that I need a bigger hard drive and a updated chip for my brain.

It doesn’t help to view an Internet video highlighting the rapid pace of change and learning that the amount of information contained in one week’s New York Times is more a person in the 18^th century would have received over an entire lifetime! 

Something was wrong. I love to teach the bible, it is one of my favorite things. I enjoy diving into the text and context breathing a prayer that the Teacher will teach me, enlighten me, as to what the women I teach need to hear.   But this day, I began preparation of the week’s lesson and sensed in my spirit an inner resistance.  It was a hard message, an unpopular one, and a painful one. 

When Ray and I visited the Galapagos Islands, one of my favorite pictures was the two of us with a gigantic tortoise. Unfortunately, my big ol' red purse was on the ground in the picture too. So I photoshopped it out.

We're thinking about having a baby. We're not nursery-painting or buying monogrammed burp cloths or anything. We did rescue a friendly, abandoned puppy as a first step in practicing consistent responsibility.