dual personalities

I hope your week is going well. We are experiencing heat advisories, but this is nothing new in my neck of the woods. It’s July, after all. I went to the grocery store and experienced, once again, that hot hit of heat when exiting the store. I remember as a child feeling that and also the getting into our heat box of a car (no air-conditioning) and returning to our house, also without air conditioning. Truly every summer of my youth was a long, hot summer. I am grateful for my air conditioned car and home, but sometimes I like to go out to our Florida Room and experience the summer heat of my childhood again and breathe the fresh air.

Yesterday was the 9th wedding anniversary of the boy and daughter #3. They have been a couple since 2009, and as you know, they were engaged at aged three while in preschool together.

Everything has not been all sunshine and roses for the handsome couple and they have truly been through a lot together…

…cancer, preemie twins in the NICU for three months, owning a store during COVID–but they’ve weathered it all admirably. I certainly admire them. They are a fine example of sticking together through thick and thin and smiling along the way.

“In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family’s interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual’s happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good – not the individual or the family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.”

Timothy Keller

May God continue to bless you two and your wee family.

And God bless our nephew Foster who got hitched to Goksen in Izmir, Turkey earlier in the month and also my DP’s son Chris whose postponed wedding has been re-scheduled and is in less than two weeks. Mazel Tov to you all and to your parents as well.

And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.

John 1: 16

*Johnny Mercer