Fourteen years ago today, Wendy and I were married. I definitely “married up.”

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Make sure you show the women in your life how much you appreciate them today. And not just today, but every day! They do so much for all of us.

Here is a tribute to mothers which I heard years ago, and wanted to share with you today.

MOTHER
by
Fred Cruz

Somewhere between the youthful energy of the teenager and the golden twilight years of a women’s life, there lives a marvelous and loving person known… as mother.

A mother is a curious mixture of patience, kindness, tolerance, understanding, discipline, industry, purity, and love.

A mother can be at one and the same time, both love lore and counselor to a heart-sick daughter, and a head football coach to an athletic son.

A mother can sew the tiniest stitch in the material for that dainty prom dress, and she is equally experienced in threading through the heaviest of traffic with a large station wagon.

A mother is the only creature on earth who can cry when she’s happy, laugh when she’s heartbroken, and work when she’s sick.

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Earlier this week I was a guest blogger at Goforth’s Journal, a blog about family, fathering, and following Jesus. The post is about the perfect role model for us fathers. We men are lacking in good role models, and most men in Scripture were not the best fathers. Even Jesus and Paul, whom we would like to emulate, were not married.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

I wish Jesus had been married. I wish he had fathered some children.

I know such a wish is full of theological pitfalls and problems, and would have led to disaster for the church. We probably would have tried to worship his children, and a whole sect of Christianity would have risen which claimed that to be a true child of God, you had to have some Jesus blood in your line. But still, with all the clamoring voices today and multitudes of books on how to be a good father, and how to balance marriage and ministry, I so often wish I had a definitive role model to go by.

At the bare minimum, Jesus could have written a book or two on How to Be a Husband and How to be a Father. But He didn’t.

Go on over and read the rest here.

When I was in Junior High, two of my friends, Seth and Andrew, used to get in little fights with each other. They really were best of friends, but Seth loved to bother Andrew, and Andrew loved to inflict pain on Seth. It was a great friendship.

One day, as they were going at each other at Andrew’s house, and I was sitting back watching the whole thing unfold, Andrew’s father walked in the room. Being the authority figure of the household, I thought for sure he was going to break them up. But he didn’t.

He simply walked on through the room, and on his way out, he called back over his shoulder, “Fight nicely, boys!”

I thought it was so funny. What about fighting can be nice?

But the truth is that in fighting, as in love, there are rules.

This is especially true when it comes to marriage. My wife and I never argue (cough, cough), but when we (don’t) fight, there are a few rules we try to follow which often helps us fight nicely. Recently, someone asked me for a copy of them, and I thought maybe I would make them available online for anyone else who could use them…for your friends.

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