it will cost you everything

Be assured,
this thing called love...

...it will cost you everything.

the god who hears me

I sought the LORD, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears.

psalm 34:4

you give me life...

... and i give it back to You.

Beautiful ending

This song came on the radio last Friday at the perfect time and has incredible meaning to me still. It's one of those songs that you always hear in the moment you need it, that stirs me to tears no matter when I hear it and gives me a glimpse of the larger picture of what my Father is doing and what it will all look like in the end...



On this side of heaven, the reality is, we don't have beautiful endings. We live in a broken world fraught with pain, grief and tears. Mixed with times of joy and happiness, but a world that is not perfect, for we are not yet home. But we do have hope. A hope more secure than the fleeting promise of a happy ending, but a hope of a life and a Love that never ends. We can experience the fullness of life and live and experience lives that abundant, life-giving and free, yet we live and survive within the tensions. The tensions of an already, but not yet... for we are not yet home.

"Oh tragedy has taken so many.." are the first few lines of this song and as I was driving around last Friday night reeling from the effects of some devastating news about someone dear to me and questioning so much, this song spoke to me in so many ways. In this world we face and see so much tragedy, yet that's not how our story ends, our ending will be beautiful. So beautiful.

"So tell me, what is our ending
Will it be beautiful?

So beautiful?

Will it be beautiful
Will my life
Find me by your side

Cause your love is beautiful
So beautiful…

At the end of it all, I want to be in your arms..."

you are worth dying for

The tenderness of a heart determined to serve.

Why is it that some of life's most sweetest moments are borne in our most painful ones?

Yet, yes, the answer pierces through, you are worth dying for, worth fighting for. Worthy of love and worth whatever it takes. The message was loud and clear the last couple days. In ways I will never forget.

"Chivalry in love has nothing to do with the sweetness of the appearance. It has everything to do with the tenderness of a heart determined to serve. That is the first hard lesson to learn. You do not act under the impetus of charm but out of a commitment to make someone’s life the joy you want it to be."

- I, Isaac, Take Thee, Rebekah by Ravi Zacharias

Jesus, Your name is power...

...breath and living water...
such a marvelous mystery...

"you rescued me

because you delighted in me..."

jesus, you've rescued me yet again.
all i have left to say is thank you.

romantic love has no elasticity...

If our relationship was based on "romantic love," on the diluted version of love our culture sells, a love without substance, free of commitment and void of sacrifice, we would have broken up in month two when the first intense conflicts started emerging lol. We’ve pondered this many times, the love we’ve been given and has fostered contains romance but is not romantic in nature, but sacrificial, and a love that we as Christians are called to but that is countercultural to everything within us and everything our culture sells us on what love is.

Ben and I are two intense people. We love with all we’ve got and we fight with all we’ve got lol. But through it all and through conflict, trials and challenges, we come out in the end realizing there is a Love and a love that sustains us. A love based and rooted in the Love of that Christ that has so deeply transformed and affected our lives and a love not based on nor void of emotion but not built on it, yet a love characterized by the strength of will and commitment, and a never-ending surrender to treat one another and cherish one another as we ought. A love that stretches and endures, deepens over time, that is ultimately not about us, but about something so much greater... A love is transcendent and reminds us of how He first loved us...

"ROMANTIC LOVE HAS NO ELASTICITY TO IT. It can never be stretched, it simply shatters. Mature love, the kind demanded of a good marriage, must stretch, as the sinful human condition is such that all of us have conflicting emotions. “Her hatred is real as her love is real,” Porter explains of the young wide. This is the reality of the human heart, the inevitability of two sinful people pledging to live together, with all their faults, for the rest of their lives.

A wedding calls us to our highest and best—in fact, to almost impossible—ideals. It’s the way we want to live.”

- Sacred Marriage, Gary Thomas