I celebrate and lift up and love and honor my wife Teri Parker Sammon today, on our 25th wedding anniversary. I will never be able to thank her enough for being everything that she has always been to me, except to honor her by loving her as God has called me to love her. Twenty-five years ago today, at about 4p.m., I flew the COD (Carrier Onboard Delivery) from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower off the coast of Virginia, to NAS Norfolk, where my beautiful bride picked me up and we headed off on our first day of marriage and a beautiful honeymoon. Neither of us really knew what any given day would hold when we got married. But let me encourage you who are early in marriage, or married longer than us, or considering marriage with that special person, or recovering from a failed marriage – there is always HOPE: Our path has taken us literally from coast to coast; through some of the hardest times we ever thought we would face; across ice so thin and waves so high we thought we would not make it. And there was a time when we tried really hard to not make it. But God had a different plan for us, when we first met one afternoon at Fort Benjamin Harrison’s Defense Information School in the summer of 1987. We had one beautiful date night, and then did not speak to each other or see each other for 14 months, as I was stationed overseas. When I transferred back to the States, I found here quickly, and within six months, we were married. You see, God had planned for this – He accommodated our selfishness, and our sin, and our intolerance for each other at times, because He knew where we would eventually be. He poured His grace and His mercy and His love over us so many times over the years until one day a little bit of it soaked into our hearts. On that day we both gave our hearts and our lives to God and accepted Jesus Christ as our savior on a January Sunday in Newport News, Virginia, with a great church family at Hope Community Church. That was not the start of wedded bliss, of course – we struggled through many emotional and physical and financial difficulties that we still revisit at some level all too often. But over all of that, my beautiful and Godly wife learned from the book of Titus, and from Proverbs 31, and from Ephesians 5, what a Godly, loving and devoted wife can and should be. And she is every bit of that to me and our four children today, with a heart so filled with God that she wants to pour out the mercy and grace and love of God through her experiences on other women, in the hopes that they can avoid some of the issues she has survived in her life. Her greatest accomplishment, to me, however, is not that she is this beautiful and strong woman of God with deep compassion and love and a heart to serve the Lord– it is not that she has raised and home schooled and loved our children over many years and through many moves and states, following me around; or the trials and tribulations she has endured through childbirths and surgeries and illnesses, all the while still more concerned about others than herself; and it is not that she extends to me the mercy and grace and love that God continues to show us and pour over us – it is that she has helped me realize and begin to walk as the man that God has always planned for me to be since before I was conceived: and supported me and encouraged me and lifted me up in prayer over all these years; and especially through all the years when I have not been that man of God that He planned for me to be. There is a reason why God tells us men – we husbands who are struggling and hurt, angry or ashamed, depressed and worried, lacking confidence and not knowing what to do – in Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; 26 That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, 27 That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. 28 So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. 29 For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: 30 For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.” It is God’s plan for a wife bring out in her husband the image and attitude and behaviors of Christ that He has designed into us; that we as husbands must show to our wives and children and friends and relatives, so that the love of Christ is manifest in person, here on earth, that others will see, and desire to know and have that love of Christ in their hearts as well. Husbands love to read the few verses before this that tells wives to submit to their husbands. Listen to me, all you current and future husbands, because it has taken God and my devoted wife 15-plus years to help me find this and begin to live this: focusing on what your wife should do does not change you – it only changes you when you realize that if you want to have your soulmate and helpmate truly submit to you, as we are all to submit to God, you must, MUST be an Ephesians 5:25 husband. Only then can your wife truly fulfill her role to you, and only then can you truly be the husband that God has created you to be. I am forever grateful to my wife, and will honor her by working every day to love her as Christ loved the church, and give myself for her.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:06:54 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015