New every morning

Marriage is an incredibly stretching state of living.

Duh. You could've learned that from ... well, anywhere. Even diehard singles know that marriage is hard and full of newness. Some days, marriage is nothing but new things.

The past two months have been for me, the two best and most deeply difficult and painful months I have ever experienced or struggled through. And yet, slowly, in the smallest and sweetest of ways, God loves me continually, unceasingly, patiently. He breaks, and He mends.

Today has been a sweet Saturday, full of good newness.

1. Andrew and I both ate our very first Chick-Fil-A breakfast this morning, along with new favorites from Starbucks: a salted caramel mocha frappe for me, and a pumpkin spice latte for him. We took our spoils to a town park and ate them under a blue, blue sky.

Image: reachfm.org

2. I buy books and they sit on my shelf for ages before I finally decide to buck up and read them. Today was such a day: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, bought at a library sale for a dollar. It is a painful story, full of sin and hurt; it made me cringe and want to walk away, but I am holding on, hoping for redemption. East of Eden is, after all, a dark story about sin, but so much more and deeper than that also.

Image: Amazon.com

3. Homemade bread! My mother is a whiz in the kitchen, and has the gift of baking bread. I have no idea if I have inherited this coveted trait (I had a momentary lapse of memory and forgot how to braid when I had my three nice ropes of bread dough laid out), but my kitchen sure smells good!

Image: househusbandsays.blogspot.com

4. And, like every day, God's sweet mercies are new to me today. The gospel is new to me today, because I have forgotten it since yesterday. Tomorrow, I will begin again, learning and re-learning the sweet truth that God Himself died because He loved me more than He hated my sin, loved me more than the life of His Son, loves me enough to daily give me mercy and grace, loves me enough to daily sanctify me to be like Himself, as an earthly father gently builds his children to be like him. And the great comfort is that He promises that one day, all the sad things will be untrue, and I shall be fully sanctified, fully the image and daughter He means me to be. Then I shall be new, indeed.