Thursday, September 13, 2007

She's Dating Me Again

My wife. The love of my life. My best friend. Yet another gift from God that is full of wonder and beauty and one that I did not deserve. We've been married 9 years and a few weeks. When I married her she was 21 and I was 30 (That's a whole other miracle of God that I won't take the time to describe here--i.e., the supernatural blinding of her judgment). We dated from September of 1997 until we married in August of 1998...and we started dating again a little more than a week ago. I don't mean we've been separated or uninterested in each other, because we have always enjoyed each other immensely. But, I'm so giddy these past days that I almost want to ask her Dad if I can marry her again. It's like our interest in talking late into the night and discovering more about each other has been set on fire again. We are talking about profound spiritual things.

Here's the really mind-blowing thing. We are going to begin pre-marital counseling of this terrific young couple tomorrow night. We love them and are very excited and honored to be part of their marriage preparation. We started looking over the counseling material and reading a great book by Dave Harvey entitled When Sinners Say, "I Do." It caused us to talk the other night at perhaps the greatest level of transparency about our sin that we have done to date. We talked about sinful desires and failures...and do you know what happened? The heightened understanding of our sin (after talking about it) and the resultant disgust of it caused us to revel in our Savior! Harvey quotes some old pastor (whose name I can't recall at the moment) as saying something like, "Only when you're sin becomes bitter, does the Savior become sweet." He really had something there! Oh, how I pray that we continue to learn that we are (in our respective eyes) the chief of sinners, so that we look to Christ more and more, and in so doing see that our marriage is sweeter still because of our merciful Savior.

So she's dating me again...and we're both falling in love with Jesus.

1 comment:

Josh said...

I said it on the phone and I'll say it again: this is the aspect of pre-marital counseling that we absolutely LOVE! We're happily jealous of this opportunity for you and C. Enjoy! How'd it go tonight?