Most men that I know and do life alongside have good wives. Most of us husbands can easily admit that we do not quite grasp the intricacies of the female mind and heart. Women are strangely beautiful creatures to men and we go back and forth between being curious and being perplexed when we seek to understand how you ladies think and act. When I married my girl in 1997 I did not have a clue how much I would grow to treasure her. Amy is easily lovable and I found her a delight from the first day… but I can honestly say that I did not appreciate her in those first few years like I should have. As we built a life together her virtues began to come to the top where they could be seen regularly. If we were to be honest, we have lived as a couple with constant pressures and more than a fair share of pain and tragedy. Amy has never wavered from her confidence in God’s leadership of our lives. More than once, I have. We have also been immeasurably blessed in the one realm where we both committed that we would could not fail. That place is our home…with each other and our children.
We decided we might let anything else fall to the wayside if necessary but that we would fight together, side by side, through anything which came against us, we would battle tooth and nail for the good of our family. God has seen fit to bless this commitment over the last eighteen years. I am so thankful for a wife who has fought alongside me and not against me. She is the one human on earth whom I admire most. She is a true daughter of God, friend to the upright, fiercely loyal and wise in ways that only a few know of. Amy is both strong and tender, dutiful and delicate and she can live without the world’s applause as long as she can hear the voice of her King whispering to her that she has done well. Today is Mother’s Day and I just want to say that I have never personally known of a better mom than Amy. Our children know this and have not a shred of doubt that they are priorities in their mother’s heart. They know it, they believe it, they are convinced of it and they are being fashioned by the commitment of their mom to them.
Amy, you have said no to say many things that would have brought you an easier pathway. You have nurtured our children with uninterrupted care and love their whole lives. You were there for them, especially Alicia in those early days when I was clueless about being a dad, in times when I was not. Your efforts, like most mothers of young children, never get any press or gold medals. Those are monotonous years of duty that only Heaven’s records keep track of. Feeding them , cleaning up after them, ferrying them from place to place, washing their ceaselessly dirty faces and laundry, and tending to their cuts, bruises and aches. Listening like a tender dove and defending them like a grizzly bear. You have so modeled grace and femininity to Alicia that she is already becoming a young woman of grace. You have taught our boy affection and tenderness and then turned him over to me to instill masculinity into his young heart. He will always love his mother forever but will not desire to be a mama’s boy (in the negative sense of that term). I watch you ever week and I am so grateful for your sacrifices and labors, all being done with a body that doesn’t work as it should and a heart that is still deeply broken by the absence of your own mother, from whom you reaped all this good harvest and by which your own family is now nourished. Deborah did it right with you, Amy. You are doing it right with our children. The verses below describe the reality in our home. These verses are not future goals for us. They are present reality and it is because of you, my precious wife, the beautiful mother of my children. Happy Mother’s Day.
“Her children rise up and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:
Many women have done excellently,
but you surpass them all.”
Proverbs 31:28-29