My husband and I met each other after I had moved into his room. Not one to rest long on square footage that can be used as an asset, Jack’s mother had turned his apartment into a rental property within three months after Jack joined the U.S. Coast Guard.
So, I moved in. And then Jack returned.
We both give the cat full credit for our romance. When I was gone, Jack would come downstairs and take my cat so I had to come get her when I came home from the newspaper office. When I was in my apartment, I would turn the cat loose so Jack would have a reason to bring it down. The poor cat, Puffin, lived to be over thirteen years old. It’s a surprise she had any legs left when she finally departed from us.
Every marriage starts with fun stories like this one, and with a lot of hope.
A Morning Like This is a composite story of one friend’s very real, very difficult, marriage. As Christians we often make the human commitment to grit our teeth in a relationship and get by. This story began as a simple cry from a friend’s heart after an hour of walking by the river. “I don’t want to just survive in my marriage,” she said. “I wanted to be in love. I wanted to feel passionate towards my husband. Don’t I have a right to ever expect that?” And so began, in my own heart, the story of David and Abby Treasure, Braden and Samantha. This story became a journey, a responsibility, a burden, and a joy. It became, in the end, about much more than God’s healing a marriage. It became a story about understanding the depth and the truth and the character of God’s love.
I believe the mistake we make as we walk with Christ is that we forget to expect the full goodness, the full miracle, of what a loving God, handed our trusting heart and our greatest sacrifices, can do with our marriages and with our lives. There is, I believe, a beautiful straight-arrow place that exists when we both trust our Father with the reality and the expectation of our lives.
We need to shout to the world that we don’t settle for second-best when we settle for God. Trusting Him can mean waiting and watching when we’re stuck in a place where we think we’ll never find enthusiasm or ardor again. But what He gives us, when we’ll only trust Him with frank and transparent hearts, far surpasses anything we could ever have imagined for ourselves.
May God’s love bring its sunrise of passion into your life!
Deborah Bedford
P.O. Box 9175
Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001