Family LIfe

I am a Father of a beautiful baby girl who the Lord has blessed me to take care of her during her time on this Earth. Wow, this is such a blessing. For those of you who don't know, Lorelai was born by IVF (In-Vetro Fertilization.) This procedure was emotionally and physically draining in both Amanda and myself. Rarely does this procedure work the first time you do it, but the Lord had a plan for us, and he blessed us with it working the first time. If it did not work the first time, then we could not afford to do it a second time. Coincidence, certainly not! It was all God.

I am also the Husband of a beautiful, caring, honest, God-Loving woman. She is my life...my anchor. (LOL, Amanda if you get that) She is everything to me. I don't know where my life would be without her today. We have been together for 10 years now and married for 7, and yet it seems like yesterday that I asked her to go out for coffee with me. Amanda goes along with all my craziness...from going back to school to get my BA in Bible Studies to calling the "Light Worm" toy a Bed-bug! I Love you babe!

"Effective family life does not just happen; it's the result of deliberate intention, determination, and practice." -Chuck Swindoll

Let's talk about these points. I am going to be referencing Ruth 4 while we do this.

1) Deliberate intention: What is your intent in your marriage? In your family? The dictionary defines intent as "something that is intended; purpose; design. It's origin comes from the Latin word intentus which means an aim or purpose. What is your purpose with your family? My purpose with my family is to take care of them. My aim is to be the best Father and Husband that I can be. To help support, protect and care for them. These are deliberate actions.

For those of you who know me well, I am a Huge gamer. I love video games! TO be perfectly honest, if I was still single I would probably be working at some dead end job making what I can to get by and play video games the rest of the time. But this is not my aim now. My aim or my purpose was given to me by God to take care of these beautiful women in my life. How can I let other things that don't have a purpose get in the way of this?

2) Determination: Wow, does Marriage take determination. When I think of determination to be determined to do something...I think of a race. I think that I am determined to finish this race. I will not give up, I will not give in to pressure, or hurt or pain. Marriage is like this race. Sometimes you will run into road blocks or things will get in the way of your marriage. Either finances, parents, worldly issues, whatever this may be, but are you determined to get through them?

In Ruth 4 Boaz fights for his love. He is something called a kinsman-redeemer (Hebrew: goel) Which means that Boaz was in some way related to Ruth's previous husband. Ruth was a widow. Her husband that passed away had some family in his hometown that Ruth moved to. Boaz saw her in a field picking scraps of food up and fell in love with her. But there was a roadblock. In the hierarchy of kinsman-redeemer, there was someone in front of him to take care of her and her land. So, what did he do? Did he give up and say..."Oh well, there is someone out there for me." No, he went to the other person and fought for her. He was determined to fight for his love. Men, are we determined to fight for our families. There are a lot of things in this world that we need to fight.

3) Practice: Every day I feel more and more in love with my wife. Seven year itch...you kidding me. When I get home, I say I love you babe. When she goes to work, she will always get a call from me making she she made it to work okay. Does this love, and care come easily? No, it takes practice.

How often do we still take our ladies out on dates? Now, I do have to say we don't do this as much as I would like due to a couple of reasons, but it is something we will be doing more of soon. But while we were dating, weren't we practicing our relationship.

Think about a Basketball game. If you build a team and go to your first game without any practice, what will most likely happen? You would get slaughtered! A team (marriage/family) needs to practice to build a functional unit. If you don't practice with your team, you will lose.

There is so much more I could get into on this subject, but I need to leave more for later huh? I know I need to practice some of things I said in this, but I am still learning too. I love you Hun and can't wait to see you later.