More stuff that I think about because of old photographs

I call this "The Picture"of Mama and Daddy. I found it after Mama died in her box of pictures. I had never seen it before. Written on the back: Carlton Pitts Eileen Hall. So it was taken before they were married. The handwriting is not familiar. I don’t know who the photographer could have been, or where they were, but it is amazing. They were so much in love and comitted to each other thoroughout their more than forty years of marriage. This looks like a picture of them in heaven to me. I love to think of them together there. I am so grateful for their legacy of a happy marriage full of love, commitment and sweet companionship.

God values our character more than our comfort, often using the very elements that cause us the most discomfort as his tools in creating that character. Our relationship gains strength when it is stretched to the breaking point and does not break.
Sometimes it appears that God had set us loose down here, alone admist the evil powers. We feel the same impatience over the slow, unspectacular work of the Holy Spirit as Jews felt over Jesus, the Messiah, who did not provide the kind of triumphant rescue they wanted. Marriage, like every relationship requires that we forgive daily, the one who caused the wounds that keep us from wholeness. Our wounds are the very things God uses in His service. By harboring blame for those who caused them, we delay the act of redemption that can give the wounds worth and value, and ultimately healing.