Love Letters

The other day I was rummaging through boxes of stuff most of which needs to be tossed. In those boxes I came across letters I wrote to my husband before we were married. Over the years I have on occasion taken time to read through letters and cards and random poems and papers I have written...a kind of introspective scavenger hunt...for me. Life has a way of getting too busy and especially when you are a wife and mother of little ones...it has a way of getting so busy you lose sight of you.

That of course is not always a bad thing...we often are too focused on our needs and desires and God in his wisdom gave us a husband and babies that do a fairly tremendous job of keeping us from getting too caught up...and day by day and year by year...they break us of our self centered ways.

So we give and give and give and we get too busy in a numbing, repetitive, mindless sort of way...and as the nurturer of the family we are so busy giving we lose sight of our selves. Just another day...that starts like any other day...but we can’t quite wake up and we can’t quite do much of anything and we can’t figure out why we are stuck...but we are and we just know we have nothing left to give.

Our lives feel like perpetual chaos and we wistfully dream of a hot leisurely soak in a candle lit room with claw footed tub ...but...forget it...the dishwashers slogging away, tub is running over with toddlers and yellow duckies and soaked towels, washing machine is spinning the second of an endless pile of dirty clothes that will eventually be an endless pile of clean ones, hot waters gone, kids are wet and who has time for a bath...lucky to get a two minute, lukewarm shower at midnight.

So I don’t know about you but I go on a scavenger hunt and look at photos and read old writings and talk to God and ask Him things like...What is my problem? Why can’t I get my act together and why do I feel so fat and where is Prince Charming and whose kids are these anyways?

So I read love letters, not so much to understand my husband or reaffirm his love for me...but I read love letters I wrote to understand me and reaffirm my love for him. Did I really write those sweet endearing words and did I really mean them? Do I still?

It’s amazing what you will discover. This last time, I was amazed at how much I understood God and His word. I married John less then a year after my conversion. I was a new convert when we started dating and we had a rocky relationship and over the years, we have reaped the consequences of our stupidity and violations...but I was a new convert and he was still a fairly young convert as well and we had an amazingly deep understanding of what God wanted from us even if we didn’t follow what we knew was right.

I thought about that. God writes His word upon the fleshly tablets of our hearts. He whispers His truth to us and gives us all we need the moment we confess our sins, ask for His forgiveness and invite Him into our lives. We have access to the Creator of the heavens the moment we are born again. I read those love letters by a young woman saved less then a year and I am astonished by her godly wisdom...I had the map but had never traveled with Him...knew what was right but didn’t know how to live it...so life with God is a journey.

He gives us a map...and then we spend the rest of our lives learning how to read it. We can’t read the map first, we have to read it while we walk through the land He has given us...we must journey with Him as He leads us down the path...our lives need to take...so we can find Him and understand Him and trust Him with our husband, and our kids and our fears and our shortcomings and our pain.

No one can take the journey for us...we must walk through our journey with God on our own...but it is in walking with God that we find ourselves and we find our husband and we finally understand why we wrote those love letters and why we meant every word we wrote even when we had no clue what those words meant...because you can’t really love your husband the way God intends you to love your husband and you can’t love yourself the way God intends for you to love yourself... until you start following a map you can’t fully understand and start walking with a man you can’t fully know.

Faith brought me here and faith will lead me home. I love my husband because I have chosen to love him and walk with him on a path God has led us down and because we are faithful... I have loved and been loved and those love letters...like Gods words are written upon the fleshly tablets of my heart.