For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.
Jeremiah 29: 11-13

Tis the season for all sorts of moving forward. The weather is getting warmer. School years are coming to a close. COVID vaccines are inching many parts of the world towards a shadow of “normal.” I personally know lots of people who will soon be moving on to new jobs and homes—our family included.  These times of transition always seem to tug the heart in two directions—looking forward to new adventures and the ache of what we will miss about the here and now. Leaving the familiar is always daunting, isn’t it? 

In March, Tania Alden shared an article about the simple power of intentional gratitude and how it connects us to heaven. I’m finding that standing on the brink of a big move has me counting my blessings twofold. For months now, I’ve had a running list of people, places, and things that I will miss about our lives here in Toronto: 

I often struggle with the balance of what I’m supposed to do, and what I should just let the Lord take care of. I still haven’t found the perfect balance of trusting and doing, but here are some of my favorite quotes that remind me to trust the Lord, shun evils, and follow His commandments. 

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. (Psalm 46:1)

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-11)

For thus the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, has said, ‘In repentance and rest you will be saved, in quietness and trust is your strength.’ (Isaiah 30:15)

Editor’s note – today’s post was written by Lori Odhner and published as a Marriage Moat. Lori writes these messages and sends them as weekday emails as well as posting them on social media. Throughout the year ahead we’ll be sharing a few of our favorites.

Our first home had a kitchen with a capacity for one. I mean if we sucked in our stomachs and kept our arms at our sides I could be at the sink washing dishes while John was cooking pancakes. But forget any notion of opening the fridge.

Our current home has a kitchen that is roomy enough for conversations, with a couple of kids on stools, John at the stove, and me chopping vegetables on the butcher block.  Our master bathroom, however, is the same square footage as that kitchen. There is a sink, and a toilet, but no space for passing each other on the way to the shower. If Ben decides to use ours to brush his teeth, and I want to brush mine, I  wait until he is done rather than squeeze past him. The same is true of the bathroom on the third floor, though the girls found a way to get ready for school in a hurry. Now they live in different countries.

Woah, am I really going to broach this subject? Yes, I am.

“When the souls and minds of partners are united – and it is love truly conjugial that unites them – it follows that this loving union flows into their breasts and through these into their bodies and causes a striving to conjunction.” Conjugial Love 179

The image of marriage union in the book Conjugial Love is a beautiful one, one for which we can all strive. Sometimes, in this natural world that we live in, though, we have questions, doubts and concerns about sex and don’t always know where to turn. We can turn to the Lord in prayer, however answers are not always (or usually, for me), obvious. We can turn to the Lord’s threefold Word, but precious little is said about sex, and what is is often stated in veiled terms. (Case in point: finding suitable passages to accompany this article was no easy feat!) We can turn to secular books and the internet, but sometimes what we find is very crass, or speaks from a very physical, psychological or societal perspective and doesn’t take the Lord and the holy union of one man and one woman into consideration. (–Not to mention the accompanying paranoia of being discovered and thought to have a perverted mind!) We can turn to friends, but that can be really difficult and unnerving, too, and after all, we’re all pretty much in the same boat, having only the limited aforementioned resources at our disposal. I tried to figure things out on my own, within my own head with my own faulty reasoning, often coming to wrong conclusions and deciding that it must just be me, it must just be my problem, that I needed to just suck it up and deal with it.