Valentine’s Day is here. It’s a day when our society encourages couples to take the extra steps to show their love for one another. Give flowers. Give chocolates. Go out to dinner. Celebrate love.

Some of you reading this right now are lonely. Some have been abused or hurt deeply by a spouse. Some may be single without an earthly spouse. But all of us as Christians together have a heavenly husband, and oh how great is our Groom’s love toward us!

Scripture is full of the love of God — the cross being the supreme expression of that unfathomable love.

The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he

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I find it helpful to think in paradigms, particularly in terms of the biblical sequence creation-fall-redemption-recreation. The glorious vision of the recreation of marriage under and in Christ has expanded my small thoughts on the entire issue, to help lift my eyes off the everyday pettiness and look at my marriage through the lens of the powerful cosmic-sized gospel.

The Creation and Fall of Marriage

From the creation of elementary particles ex nihilo (Genesis 1:1–3), to Adam's first breath and subsequently to the creation of Eve from Adam's flesh (Genesis 2:21–22), God has given us a fitted creation. A proton is made up of three quarks — two ‘up’ quarks and one ‘down’ quark. A neutro…

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It's easy to tell a woman to submit, or to tell a husband to love his wife as Christ loves the church, but it can be excruciating to live out. It's easy to throw these Bible verses around like the rock in David's sling hoping to knock down that Goliath of 'My Way.'

In a marriage, there's a lot of submission and a lot of loving that's supposed to be going on. But who wants to serve, who wants to sacrifice, who wants to lay down their life for another? Who wants to humble themselves for the good of another human?

The answer: Jesus Christ.

I remember when submission was first presented to me as something I must do in order to be obedient and godly. I kicked against it. Because it wasn’t t…

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I have certain days as a mother — like the one I had a few weeks ago — where the eight-year-old, four-year-old, and one-year-old were all crying at the same time, each for a different reason. It is these kinds of days where I succumb to the "what ifs." What if I had gotten my Ph.D?

I could be in a quiet little office at some university doing theoretical physics. Life would be simple, quiet, and I would see the beauty of God everyday in the macro and the quantum worlds. Or, What if I had finished law school? I would be doing constitutional law working to turn this country and culture around.

But as I write the first draft of this article, I am in the car on our way home to Arizona from Ca…

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