There's More!

As we dive deeper into the plan that God has for a man and woman under the guise of marriage we realize that God has more for us. There is not one of us that can say "I have arrived in my marriage" or "I have arrived in Christ".

I started falling for my wife Yaunette early one summer before my junior year, her sophomore year of High School, while at a birthday party for a mutual friend. I followed her around the whole evening, please note though she did not mind it one bit, and from there I could not get her off my mind. I spent the remaining part of the summer thinking about her, infatuated even to the point where I recorded myself on a handheld tape recorder asking her out (I think I still may have the tape). Now there were a couple of hurdles in getting together for a date, to hang out or even a phone call and that being she was a PK (preachers kid), that and the fact she was not allowed to date until she was sixteen. I got over some of my anxieties involved with getting to better know a PK with the help and prompting of some of Yaunette's girl friends. After the help, the sit down meeting with her dad in his study and after she had turned sixteen we began a dating relationship where we fell madly in love. The chase that began at the birthday party during the summer of 1990 continued from our High School town in the Midwest all the way to the far northwest, Alaska where she moved with her family and we began our long distance relationship. The chase then got a little closer our freshman year of college, Yaunette finished high school a year early to get out of Alaska and started at Lee University and I at Penn State. Although the amount of travel was a bit closer, the distance had taken a toll and we started growing a part. The freshman year in college for me was monumental in my life in that for the first time I really began laying my wants and desires aside and started focusing on what he had for me. In that seeking and searching I saw that the Lord was leading me to Bryan College where I could play college soccer, pursue a Christian Education degree and where only a ferry ride across the Tennessee river separated Yaunette from myself. The chase continued and led to a closer friendship, a deeper love, more devotion to each other, engagement and then marriage.

I encourage you as I encourage myself to continue to pursue the one you love and while doing so pursue the Lord and Savior with an even greater intensity and you will fall deeper in love and in doing so revel in the joy that follows.

Matt

Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

"Love your neighbor as yourself..." Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27, Romans 13:9, Galatians 5:14 and James 2:8. I did not realize until I started this post that the Lord asks us at least 5 times to love our neighbors as ourselves. It is vital that we as believers share the love of Jesus Christ to those who live around us.

Good neighbors are here at Grace Point for example the person who felt compelled to help their single mom neighbor who did not have a washer machine to wash her daughters clothes for school, to the person who felt led to help a coworker fix their roof, to the person who saw a need for a handicap ramp for a person just a stones throw from our church building.

I want to encourage you, as Christ asks us, to Love your neighbor as yourself and do it in big ways and in small ways.

Grace to you, Matt