For Love

My Shoulders arrives home from Chile, and I pick him up at the airport. (again!)   He stands at the curb wearing weary travel face.  Wrinkles just there around his eyes, but still the same.  Still the boy I started falling for when I was sixteen.  The boy in physics class.  We hardly spoke.  But I still have all his notes.

His hand on my hip, smiling through a kiss, and my, how the years have flown!  I wonder at all that we have been through, and all this changing hope God has wrought in the hearts of us...to make the two one.  That process can be quite harrowing at times now, can't it?

Late start.  Brought four kids into this crazy life together knowing ABOUT God, but not KNOWING God.  Oh, hasn't HIS grace been deeply good to us?  Didn't HE just reach right down and flip things around?  Not perfect, but at least right side up.  That amazing Love.

He hands me a journal full of love notes, and I'm so glad Jesus showed me how to forgive.  I would have missed this!  I would have missed seeing him model love and sacrifice; work and fun for the kids and for me.  This man is a fruit bearing tree.  His life, the book of ROMANS,  a journal full of love notes, carved straight into the skin of his back.  Yes.  Right there across his shoulders.  And how does a woman give thanks for her man?

He would say, "By loving God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul and with all your strength."  I smile.  Knowing that.  Chasing that.

And this is what all these children will remember.  A broken mama with an insatiable desire for the things of God.  And their daddy?  Oh, their daddy!  An imperfect man chasing after God's perfect heart.  (And most likely sweeping in his underwear.)

For love,

Bernadette