Afterglow

So yeah, your face really does glow after that first kiss.

On May 23, 2008, I wedded the love of my life, Lana Marie.  Tonight we have completed the first of (Lord willing) many years together.  I praise my God for the love He has lavished on me and my wife.  Thank You, Father, for this good and perfect gift!

To my Lana, I say:

The springtime's arriving, the blossoms appear
The rain's gone away, and our love song is here
So come with me, darling, my beautiful one
'Cause the winter is over, and we've just begun

I love you.

Thank You

My lovely wife is lying in bed right now, not feeling good at all today, very tired and hurting (nearly) all over. Praise the Lord, I didn't have to go to work today and I get to stay home and be with her. She has been awesome this past week. Somebody was congratulating me last night on my role in our church's Easter program, and I told them the truth: Lana did the thankless work behind the scenes for it. Well, I say thankless, but I have thanked her for it and I wanted to do it publicly as well, because I'm proud of her.

So, my Lana, thank you...

• for patiently enduring eight consecutive evenings away from home (ending last night).
• for patiently enduring two and a half months of husband-beardedness, even though you would MUCH rather me be clean-shaven.
• for working hard to improve a horrid wig that turned out to be the only one usable for the part I was playing; a lot of people still heavily criticized the wig, not knowing how bad it originally was and how much you labored to make it work for me. You did a great job, love, and I was pleased with it!
• for testing out makeup on a willing guinea pig (uh, thank you also to my brother Caleb!) not once but twice.
• for going to Wal-Mart more times than we thought humanly possible, always to get some other thing we had just discovered we needed for the program.
• for constantly encouraging and blessing me with smiles, prayers, kind words, selfless actions.
• for spending over an hour before each performance, putting on my makeup and helping me with my costume.
• for helping me keep up with my various costumes and props, and making sure that we put them in the right places before each performance.
• for doing all this while also singing in the choir in the program.
• for scrubbing, exfoliating, washing, and tanning me at various points before and after the program.
• for cutting my hair and beard last night so I could shave the beard and you could feel my smooth face again!
• for being a loving, submissive, patient help-meet, which is nothing new; it just shone out even more brightly this last week.

All praise ultimately goes to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He has created my wife, equipped her to love and serve me, and has begun this good work in her. And He will carry it through to the day of completion in Christ Jesus.

Thank you so much, my Lana; I'm so proud of you, and I'm so thankful for all you've done for me, especially with the Easter program! I love you so much! :%

A Father's Thoughts

The Baby Story Thus Far

A Father's Thoughts
I pray that God uses me in whatever way he sees fit. It excites me to look back on my life and be able to point out specific times when I can clearly see how he used me. In some cases I could see it as it was happening; in others I still can't see what he was doing through me. But I praise him that he does use me as his vessel, and pray that I will always be useful to him.

It's a strange emotion, then, to discover that my Lord has used me and my wonderful wife to create a new life. Over the past two days, I have meditated on this wonderful mystery. Lana and I have conceived, not a fetal blob, but a complete person, who will one day (if the Lord wills) burp and cry and dance, and run and chew and laugh, and ask and wonder and learn, and love and lose and weep, and listen and understand and believe. Out of the love of a husband and wife comes a new love - tenderly we will give it and slowly receive it.

Only eight and a half months have passed since I left my father and mother to cleave to my wife, and already I foresee the day when my precious child will leave Lana and me and join in marriage with another. Our task is to prepare him or her for that day, for that person, for that life. In the meantime, we will enjoy life with the third member of our family.

Praise you, Father, for the child you have granted me and Lana. May we never fail to remember that he or she belongs to you, and that you have entrusted us to raise him or her up in the knowledge and instruction of the Lord. May we one day send our child out from us, a flaming arrow to bring a little more light into the darkness of this world.

Readers, please pray for our three-person family. My new highest priority is doing everything I can to protect my wife and our baby during this fragile period of pregnancy. But ultimately it is the Lord's to give or to take away, to preserve or to extinguish. Pray that we will trust him completely and praise him in good time or ill.

And yes, I am jacked about being a dad! Praise the Lord!!!