Notes From A Bridal Shower

Traveling this week, so am digging into the archives for a post to link with emily at imperfect prose.

This is an excerpt of a devotional I gave for a young lady from my church.  She is one of the most imaginative, creative, whimsical young ladies I know. As a kindergarten teacher, she probably seems more like a fairy godmother to her students than their teacher. This is some of what I shared with her:

Your creativity, imagination, and sense of wonder and play are amazing gifts, and I am in awe of them. These are gifts you will bring to your marriage and to your relationship with (your husband). Now that I have all this gray hair and alleged wisdom, however, I’m slowly starting to learn that sometimes our gifts can also be our biggest stumbling blocks. Your gifts and your talents are very beautiful and very important. They were given to you by God, and He expects you to use them to serve others and for His glory. The challenge, however, for someone like you with your creative, artistic temperament and way of looking at the world can be summed up (in a quote from a popular Mary Engelbreit) illustration:

Life is just so daily.

Daily life all too often seems to have little use for the creative, the imaginative, and the whimsical. Maintaining a home, a job, a car, a marriage calls for daily offerings of duty and responsibility, not all of which allow for free-spiritedness and artistic interpretation. Some of it is just downright boring, repetitive, and feels like drudgery. Employers, landlords, banks, and tax collectors tend to frown on creative interpretations of their demands. Things break down and need to be maintained or replaced. While you will be managing these things side-by-side with the man you love, you won’t always be able to draw on your strengths in building a life and a home together.

And that’s actually a good thing.

Because although (your fiance) was drawn to you, in part, because of all your beautiful, whimsical, creative strengths that we all know and love, if you could manage marriage and life simply by playing to your strengths, you really wouldn’t need Jesus. It’s in our areas of weakness, when we are out of our element—when washing machines break down and schedules conflict and the taxes are due and life is getting stressful and hard--that we realize how desperately we need to cry out to and cling to Him

In II Corinthians 12, the apostle Paul wrote:

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.  Verses 9,10.

Or, to put it another way, in the words of an old Sunday school song that, I’m sure is near and dear to anyone, like you, who loves working with young children:

Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong. They are weak but He is strong.

We are so excited about your upcoming marriage, that the Lord has given you a godly man who loves you and gets you and appreciates all of your marvelous strengths. But know that in the context of your marriage, your weaknesses, your vulnerabilities, your sin will be exposed. This is true for (your husband) as well as for you. Within the context of your marriage, you will be given the blessing of having the opportunity to live out the gospel in this life that is just so daily--to acknowledge each others’ weaknesses, to ask for and extend grace, to cast yourselves before Christ and learn ever more deeply just how much He loves you. Don’t be surprised by your weaknesses, nor by (your husband's).

May God give you eyes to see them as opportunities to draw nearer to Him. And may the power of Christ rest upon you both. I love you.