Whelp! It's 3:49 am and I'm studying for my BIG math test in about 4 hours. I'm taking Partial Differential Equations at OU and we have a test over Laplace Transforms, Fourier Transforms, and Separation of Variables to solve partial differential equations. And I think I'm ready to take it? Maybe? We'll see. But I keep thinking about the big vacation our family, along with my parents, are taking this October to New Mexico. I absolutely love the desert southwest. I think it's one of the most beautiful places God made. We stay at this Hyatt resort north of Albuquerque called the Tamaya Inn. And it's just incredible. And it's cheap too! The whole inn is designed such that you never know that you are actually just outside of a huge city. It feels like you are alone in the desert. To the east are the Sandia mountains. Which my wife and I, when we went last year, would go out to the back patio and sit on the chairs and look at while we had our breakfast. I'm excited to play with my girls in one of the two pools they have (Hopefully, the weather will still be nice enough to go swimming in early October). And also to go to this little place called The Range Cafe. It's an oddity of the surrounding city. They have a wall with about 40 signed plates of all these celebrities who have been there. From actors like Will Ferrell to politicians like Obama, it seems that this cafe is the popular place to go to if you are famous and in New Mexico. When you eat the food there, you understand. It's literally the best food we've ever eaten before. It's New Mexcian food, so it's all New Mexican cultural food. And it's just amazing. They put chili sauce on everything and it's just wonderful. I could go on about New Mexico forever, but I'll stop with a note on Santa Fe. This little town about 30 minutes north of the Inn has the third most art in the city in the entire world (behind Rome and Paris, maybe?). All of these local artists sell their works on the street. They have these street vendors there who make the best fajitas you've ever had (That's a traditional Santa-Fe style building in adobe above ^). The whole thing is just an awesome experience. (And one last thing, one of the most awesome experiences is driving in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. No lights in any direction, 100% quiet. It's just you and God and about a billion stars overhead. It's something you can't experience anywhere else)
One of the things I can't stand about still being in school is being awake in the middle of the night to study. It's the only free time I can get to focus on my work, but it's no fun because I'm away from my wife. I am nuts about my wife. I follow her around the house and she can't get away from me. I won't let her! :) And you know, I spent years and years waiting on Jesus to bring me my wife and I mentally understood back then that marriage with her would reflect me and Jesus' relationship. But it's not until you are married that you understand that even more. Worship takes on a whole different form. Like if God lived in our house too, physically, I would follow him around too. Because I'm even more crazy about him. And that would be worship. Not so much because following someone around is worship, but just because your heart already worships them that everything you do with them, whether it's sitting on the porch having a cup of tea on a rainy day or going swimming on a hot summer day, is just worship.
The pastor at our old church said once, women want you to make them dazzle. How true! My wife and I were at Target the other week and she saw this romper that she really like and caught her eye. And so I stopped by on my way home from work later and got it for her. Needless to say, she LOVED it. It made her dazzle. And she took my breath away in it. Just like when we go out on a big date and she gets all dressed up, wearing a beautiful dress just for me. Wow, is all I can say in those moments. And it makes me all think, this is what God wants with me in Heaven. He's showing to me in my wife how he is going to look to me in my eyes. He is showing to me how he wants to be pursued and how he wants me to desire him and in a very real way, make him dazzle (not that he needs to be made to dazzle, he already does. But he does desire us to pursue him and that includes some dazzling :) 2 Thessalonians 1:10 says that Jesus will be "marveled at among all those who have believed." (NIV) God really, truly has set his image in us as women and men. I could never escape that from knowing my wife and how beautiful she is. She has God's fingerprints all over everything she is. God is a being of incredible beauty. And let's admit it, galaxies and stars and volcanoes and whatever else nature has to offer is great and all. But none of it cuts to the quick of the heart except for maybe in some transcendentalist moment when one too many pots of coffee have been drank. And men should pick up on this immediately. What really goes straight to the heart, is the beauty of our wives (speaking from the point of view as men). And God is not some natural wonder to check out; he has beauty that will keep you up at night dreaming about being in his arms. I don't think Yellowstone or my last tour at the natural history museum made me dream of passionate embraces with God. To men, I would say pursue your wives more than ever, make her dazzle, and through the process you will learn more intimate things about God than you ever thought possible. And if you not married, dream, dream, dream about God's beauty and pursue him in the waiting time! To women, I would say embrace your beauty. Completely, fully. And embrace it as you have been given the very mirror reflection of God's own beauty (one that his lovers will literally just stop and stare at when he returns). And embracing your beauty doesn't mean running to the vanity of mainstream media who say beauty is losing 10 lbs or wearing this eyeshadow, etc. It means embracing your beauty and believing you are beautiful. And you are pursued by Jesus. Our God who is crazy about us, desires us, and would do anything for us. Even die for our sins to save us. All to one day marry us.
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