Sunday Reflections

At church this morning, our pastor preached a sermon entitled God’s Household Rules:Love Your Wife based on the text of Ephesians 5:25-29. While there was much I took away from this sermon, perhaps the most crucial point made was the call to see marriage with an eternal perspective. The pastor spoke specifically of four areas in which we should view our wives in light of, those being:

1.Loving your wife in light of Christ’s special love for the Church
2.Loving your wife in light of Christ’s work on the Cross
3.Loving your wife with a view to her growth in grace
4.Loving your wife with a view to glorification

As was shown, Paul’s aim within this text is to exhort husbands to love their wives in light of these realities. How easy it is to come to marriage with only temporal concerns in mind, rather than viewing it in the eternal reality Paul calls us to.

During the service, we sang William Cooper’s There is a Fountain, a hymn I’ve become quite fond of this past year. The final stanza reads:

Redeeming love has been my theme/And shall be till I die

My prayer is that the redeeming love of Christ would manifest itself in all of my life…especially in my marriage.

The Student Village Steps of DOOM

Before I delve into today’s story, allow me to establish the context of the matter. To begin with, Emily and I are orignally from Corpus Christi (born and raised) which, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the area, is in South Texas along the Gulf of Mexico. Let me just add that Corpus is legitimately considered part of South Texas. I’ve heard others try to label Houston as part of South Texas. No…no…absolutely not. I’m even a bit uneasy of admitting San Antonio as part of South Texas, even though my argument for such is anything but cogent, as well as the fact that I’m an avid Spurs fan (which is difficult to be in the Dallas/Ft.Worth Area…I guess I’d be bitter too if my team blew it in the finals as well). In any matter, I say all this for the reason that Corpus has one season…Summer. Yes, there are your fluke days when it’ll be in the 70s and the humidity will be at 80%, an all time low for Corpus. And sure, there was that one time when it snowed on Christmas Eve, but like all of us truly know in our hearts, it will more than likely never happen again. As such, Emily and I are only familiar with the hot and humid, not the cold and catastrophic weather North Texas has greeted us with. (Yes I’m excessively using hyperbole…)

With that said, here’s the story. Fort Worth is currently under a barrage of Arctic Weather, as is the rest of North Texas. The high has been a steady 32, with lows hovering somewhere in the 20s. If you were to look outside our window, you would see icicles hanging down from the trees, as well as from all the vehicles parked in our lot. Needless to say, its cold…ridiculously cold for two people whose concept of winter is somewhere around 55 degrees. Thus, with such conditions outside, Emily and I made the trek to Hobby Lobby to use a gift card we recieved for Christmas. We quickly returned home, opting to leave our purchases in the trunk and return later to bring them inside rather than stand outside in the freezing rain.

So about an hour later, Emily looks over at me with that look of hers, reminding me that even that I don’t know want to, we need to go get the stuff out of the trunk. So with reluctance on my part, I take time to get my parka on while Emily goes on ahead of me to the parking lot in the back. By the time I get outside, I see Emily bent over at the bottom of the stairs writhing in pain. Me, being the loving, concerned husband I am yell “What happened?!??!” Yet, it was the milisecond after the words left my mouth that I learned firsthand exactly what happened to Emily, as I slipped off the top step and tumbled all the way down to the bottom. When I opened my eyes at the bottom, I looked up and saw Emily, not with the gut-wrenching expression of pain I had seen before my tumultuous fall, but on the contrary, with bursts of laughter from the situation at hand. My response? Laughter upon laughter upon laughter. What else could we do? Everything about the situation was hilarious, aside from our aching bodies. We were just thankful no one was around to catch our catastrophe for themselves.

What did I learn from this little debacle, you might ask? Only this…I love laughing with my wife. No matter how bad it hurt, Emily and I will always look back on those steps at the Student Village with laughter…and that’s a pretty awesome thing.

Firsts…

While I have no desire to join the myriad of others who have composed “The Year 2006 in Review,” or something of the like, I feel avoiding such an article to be inevitable due to the garganteous amount of “firsts” or “beginnings” (which is probably the more appropiate term for my marriage, as its the only wedding/marriage I’m going to have) the year 2006 brought into my life.

To begin, 2006 will forever been known as the year when Zach Bowden was taken off the market (yeah…i’m embellishing a bit) as God graciously gave me the wonderful gift of Emily, my godly, gorgeous bride. (By the way, this list, if you want to call it that, isn’t in chronological order…I just saw it fit to put the wedding at the top…I’m sure you’d agree with that decision) While I’ve only been married for 3 months now, rest assured that God has taught me much through this covenant Emily and I entered into in October. As I plan to further chronicle the lessons I’ve learned from marriage thus far in blog entries yet to come, I’ll simply say that in these past months, while my pride and selfishness have become quite evident, God’s grace and mercy have only appeared all the more magnificent, as in my never-ending insufficiency, I have come to closer grips with the truth that God is eternally sufficient. It is my fervent prayer that God would mold me into the husband he would have me be, that Ephesians 5:25 would be seared upon my mind and heart:

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctfiy her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be whole and without blemish.”

Marriage is a wonderfully serious covenant, and, as my friends have told me, has been a wonderful agent in my sanctification.

Another “first” of note is that August of 2006 marked my first semester at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. While the semester was a rigourous one, as it rightly should be, I couldn’t be more thankful for the time God has granted us here. I look forward with great excitement to what is yet to be learned and the friendships that have yet to be made.

And finally, I’ll end with a “first” that I simply can’t fail to mention, that being that it was in the year 2006 that I was first introduced to the show to end all shows…24 (You know what I’m talking about Ched). I got hooked midway through season 5 and fortunately for me, my younger brother was employed at a video store thus enabling me to watch seasons 1-4 for free! Unfortunately, my addiction began during finals of my senior year of college so needless to say, sleep rarely ever came, as either had studying to do or more often than thought, was curious as to whether or not CTU would finally listen to Jack Bauer. Its been well said that “If everyone on 24 actually listened to Jack Bauer, the show would be called 12.”

Firsts….2006 was “chalk-full” of them, and I look forward to further meditating on the lessons learned, but also look forward to that which lies ahead.

Praying for progress…

My record as a member of the blogosphere is bleak at best, so I pray that as I once again attempt to pick up the proverbial pen, I’ll follow through with some semblance of consistency. In any matter, I hope to use this blog as a means to convey or articulate, as my friend Ched might say, that which God is teaching me, whether it be in marriage, seminary, daily happenings, or in the upcoming season of 24 (kidding…well…kind of).

This past year has brought many lessons to bear on my life, and I most certainly look forward to the road ahead…(especially since this year, I have a godly, gorgeous wife by my side!)