My Heart Beats Grateful

There is simply too much...to much...to quote here: How Tired People Make Love by Ann Voskamp

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"We married wrong.

Don’t buy what anybody else is selling: Everyone always marry wrong.

Because what’s wrong in the world is always us." ~ A.V.

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I've been reading so many articles this week about what true love is and how love is really a suffering reality rather than a sacred romance.

More than these articles, I've spent many moments with faces of love on the other side of our kitchen table. Many moments.

Faces I've loved since birth...

Faces I've loved on the digits of one hand...and then beyond.

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"Love isn’t blind — Love is the only way of really seeing. You have loved me real." ~ A.V.

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We've spend moments trying to write on the hearts that sit around our kitchen table.

So many hearts. So many personal encounters.

Hearts who already know our love language.

Hearts who are open to what we have to say. Hearts that absorb it readily.

Hearts who sing.

Hearts who smile.

Hearts who don't always listen.

Hearts who weep.

Hearts who listen.

Hearts who whisper.

Hearts who soar.

Hearts who wonder.

Hearts who we can only pray will understand in time how a painful heart that bleeds is better than a dead heart that doesn't.

Hearts who have never heard our love language, yet listen.

Hearts who ache.

Hearts broken.

Hearts who pray when we can do nothing else.

Open hearts.

Hearts who dance.

That's all I ask of the hearts that gather around our kitchen table.

Open hearts.

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"The value of loving is in the value of being like Christ.

You have lived and bore the weight of it —- I am far worse than I ever dreamed. And yet you have loved me beyond what I could ever dream. You have lived Gospel to me." ~ A.V.

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"Falling in love never made anyone angels… it’s only made it clear how far we’ve fallen.

"Who we say ‘I do’ to — is not who we roll over to touch twenty years later. The challenge for the vows is to fall in love with the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

"The vows are a vow to make the stranger you marry — come to intimately know love everyday.

This is the only way we become married to the right people." ~ A.V.

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We speak this language and share it around our kitchen table because I never want these hearts to ever become just raw, bare, newsprint statistics that have no flesh, no heart, no soul. Void in a heavy sea of souls based on the latest statistics.

I want them to know they are something more.

So much more.

I entrust these hearts to Him who sees all and hears all and knows all...

...especially when my heart is too full, too tired, too lost, too discouraged, too unfocused to remember the language, the beat, the rhythm of the dance.