Dwayne has been the man I have loved since I was 16 years old. I have grown up with him; physically, spiritually, and emotionally. He is my closest friend, my deepest love, my strong leader, my spiritual teacher, my life partner, my wise co-parent, my perfect completer, and my God given gift.
When I step back and look at my marriage over the last 29 years, it is a very interesting and wonderful picture. It is a canvas which has been painted by us. It has many colors and textures. It shows our goodness and our ugliness. It shows the different roads our life has taken. It shows an array of feelings and experiences. It has its valleys and its mountain tops. It has accomplishments, setbacks and failures. It has heartbreaks and pure joy, love and disgust, excitement and boredom, closeness and separation, adventure and ruts, projects completed and projects unfinished, happiness and anger, passion and routine, tears and laughter. Though it has ugly spots, it is beautiful to me and I cherish every stroke. However, I never forget that the real beauty of this painting is not the part we painted. The real beauty comes from the hand of God. He has glazed the entire picture with His grace. It is His power, His love, and His mercy in our lives that will continue our ‘work of art’ until the last brush stroke is done, the masterpiece is completed, and one of us goes to the presence of God and lays our painting at the feet of Jesus!
May we never lose sight of what picture we want to lay at the feet of Christ! Do we want it completed? Do we want it full of hatred and void of forgiveness? Do we want His hand of grace to be prevalent? It is our gift back to Him; may it be a masterpiece of the Master’s work!
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life, and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.
Romans 12:1
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