Welcome to those visiting from Project Afterbelly! So glad to have you here at Message in a Mason Jar where we’re finding the loveliest things in the most ordinary containers. To get posts delivered to your email box or blog reader, enter your email address on the homepage sidebar or enter http://messageinamasonjar.com/feed/ in your reader.

Take Heart Series ~ Feb 2013This week in our Take Heart series we’re talking about romance. We’d love to have you link up with us and share how God has helped you take heart in the midst of your own struggles in singleness, dating, married life or abandonment. We’ve got some great things coming tomorrow, too, including another handmade giveaway to accompany a gorgeous piece of writing by my sister, a bittersweet bit of prose that I’ve been wanting to share here for a long time.

stitching

image by Bonifacio Pontonio

My friend asked us to do something totally weird. She asked each member of our Bible study group to go to the wastebasket and pick out a piece of trash to put in our pockets. Then she told us to carry it around for the day.

“You likely didn’t select a rotten, moldy, stinky piece of trash,” Kelli said, “But imagine what it would be like if you had. Would you be willing to carry something rancid around with you all day?”

Who would treat bonafide trash like treasure? It sounded absurd. But isn’t this what we do when we hold on to the missteps, the misspoken words, the shortcomings of our own husbands?

“Why carry around with you the burden of whatever it is that has hurt, angered or embittered you?” Kelli challenges in her devotional study, Enrich Your Marriage, “Why cherish it like a treasure when in reality it is a rotten, loathsome, putrid piece of garbage?”

When we let go of keeping that record of wrong, our mind is freed up to think on whatever is lovely in our marriage. When we choose to tie our memory to those beautiful, breathless moments when time slows and our hearts race, those moments that stand as monuments to our love, we are better able to forgive the mess-ups when they come.

Today, I’m sharing at Project Afterbelly about one particular memory, a proof of love that replays itself like a movie in my mind…. How my husband was with me in the struggle of childbirth, helping me believe to the point of the crowning. How we held our baby, this representation of our love visible in the world, all these characteristics of husband and wife bundled together in this new life. How we were one and our little boy was the evidence.

Join me at Nathalie’s place for more….

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