Today marks 5 years of marriage for my wife, VeLora, and I. What a blessing it is to call her my wife as she is my better half. ( The smarter, prettier half who just doesn’t see that well) I honestly can’t believe five years have already passed as husband and wife. To make a long story short, I was going through my email to empty out old emails and I found this pastor devotion that I had written the week leading up to my wedding. While I have learned many lessons during our union together and there are many more lessons to learn, let me share this wonderful lesson God put on my heart five years ago, just a few days before we said I Do.
Pastor Devotion
May 27th, 2015
So this is the week! It is honestly surreal how fast the past 6 months has been and now it is time for me to marry the love of my life. There is so much going on right now and if this doesn’t make sense I apologize, but I do have a point to make. My whole life, I have been anxiously anticipating meeting my life partner and starting a family. However, I must say, nothing ever went as I had originally planned. No one in their right mind plans heartache, failed relationships, and pain. We obviously plan the fairy tale endings of happily ever after. However, I have come to find out what many of you have already found out and some of you are beginning to find out, life isn’t that simple.
Somewhere along the way, we start thinking about “the one” but not in a sense of the one God sent us but “the one” who we see from the fairy tales we grew up reading about and watching on TV. This misconception that the world leads us to, makes us think of what “the one” can do for us and if “the one” fits all the check boxes. The older I get and each day I spend with “my one” I realize none of that is true and isn’t a healthy outlook on relationships. VeLora is the love of my life but she isn’t perfect and nor am I. She doesn’t fit all the check boxes I thought I needed and I’m sure I don’t fit all of hers. But the point is marriage and relationships aren’t about what the other person can do for you or what you can do for them. Marriage is about two people coming together and making one. That doesn’t mean we will agree on everything, and doesn’t mean there won’t be arguments. What it means is that VeLora and I are to become one in the way God intended for it to be. I won’t lean on her and she won’t lean on me, we will lean on God to grow us closer together and closer to him.
My point is, I wouldn’t trade all the heartache and pain that life has thrown at me because it helped mold me into the man I am today and led me to VeLora and led me to God. I still have many lessons to learn, as many of you know, but a lesson that I keep learning over and over is that everything works for the good of the Lord. The bad, the good, the not so good, and the not so bad things that happen in everyday life, truly work together for the good of the Lord (Romans 8:28). It’s hard to see at times and it’s even more difficult to believe during those trying times in your life. But the older I get, the more I get to see how everything I went through led me here, led me to VeLora but more importantly led me to God. He has truly blessed me and I hope you see how much He has truly blessed you.
“22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman, ‘ for she was taken out of man.” 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
Genesis 2:22-24