HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MY LOVE! -- Devotional for August 30, from "Good Seeds"

So Jacob served seven years for Rachel – and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her. (Genesis 29:20)

My wife Karen and I raised three daughters. To help prepare them for marriage, we needed to help them through the dating days. I remember telling them something I’d heard from Dr. Dobson: “What is reserved for the future will not spoil with the keeping.” In other words, just because you think you have met your “Mr. Right,” there is a lot of groundwork to be laid first, before giving yourself to him, heart, soul and body. And while you’re doing your research, and enduring your maturing, nothing (no one) is going to go away that shouldn’t go away. Nothing’s going to spoil with the keeping. Your love, his love, and the hopes and dreams you share together – or suffer alone – will not perish, though they must sit in solitary confinement in the pantry of patience for what seems like eons of time. If it was meant to be, then it will still be there, but now in full blossom, when the time is right. In the meantime, though, you must not think or behave like married people. In plain language, you do not go to bed with him! Having to hold off on the thing your body is now ready to do, because your life in every other way is not ready – is part of the disciplinary process: the building of character, the molding of morality, and the trusting of God. But now, rewind back one generation, to the time when this all-wise father was but a lad of fifteen -- not much more than a wise-guy then! He’s just been invited to a birthday party – of a former girlfriend, no less! But there he meets the girl of his dreams. It was absolutely love at first sight! They talked small talk, of course, for they were just kids, but why were they talking marriage, too? Because somehow Mr. and Mrs. Right had found each other! Jacob had to wait seven years for the girl of his dreams. Well, Steve had two more years of high school, and five years of college ahead of him…seven years! It might have been easy for Jacob; I guess his love was far more mature, godly and disciplined; in other words, it was actual love, that thinks of the welfare of the other, and not puppy love, that thinks only of having all his own little puppy needs met. As it turns out, we waited five years, and tied the knot at age twenty. And now, this day, my bride is forty-four years older (I would not dare disclose her age in plain numbers!), and I can say now, looking back with imperfect memory, that those five years did indeed fly by, feeling more like just 5 days, or five minutes, because we surely did, in our own growing puppy way, love each other! And, knowing that what we anticipated with great joy and excitement – what would be the height of pleasure short of heaven – could be spoiled in one act of indiscretion, we did indeed wait. So…Happy Birthday, my love!