What a great birthday.

I turned 25 on Tuesday. TWENTY-FIVE. A quarter of a century. It actually doesn’t bother me a bit. I’m pretty happy with where I am now…not even physically, like where I live and work…but where I am in my heart and in my head. And I feel immensely blessed. So much so that I feel undeserving of it.

My husband went above and beyond for my birthday. And in the process, he taught me a bit about extravagance.

Here’s what he did:

-bought me all kinds of mums for the front of our house
-a beautiful wall decoration (a wrought-iron tree) to go among all our photographs
-beautiful flowers sent to me at work
-a fire pit (finally!)
-the curtains we’ve been wanting for MONTHS
-a SURPRISE party!…with friends, family, pizza, cake, and lots of games (Guesstures…my favorite!)

And that night, after we had played and laughed and ate and stayed up late, we were laying there talking after everyone left. He started to tell me all the people who said they’d come to the party and didn’t…how he didn’t get a chance to actually plant the mums…how the curtains weren’t exactly what he thought I wanted, etc. And he was getting a little sad because he felt like things didn’t pan out quite as well as he’d planned.

And I’m thinkin, WHAT?! I was so thankful and happy for my gifts that I was appalled he felt they weren’t good enough! I had been so surprised, and everytime I found one more thing he did (like when I noticed the curtains, or how he rearranged the photos on the wall to make room for the tree), I was blown away by the little things he did. It was one thing after another. How could he ever feel like it wasn’t enough?

Extravagant love. Wasteful, reckless, abundant love. It sounds romantical and so…not reality. But it is. And it’s how God loved us. It’s how He calls us to love each other. More specifially, he also calls husbands to love their wives this way…

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Eph. 5:25

Cody is certainly imperfect, and hurts me sometimes, and I retaliate. We are human. But this week, he showed me what it means to be extravagant…not only by buying me lots of things or throwing a party. Those are just things. But he showed me his extravagance in this…that it wasn’t good enough, big enough, expressive enough of what he feels inside. And that touches me deeply. He longed for it to be better. Nothing was enough to accurately show the way he loves me.

I truly think God feels that way towards us. He offers so much. Sometimes we catch it, sometimes we don’t. And He watches us roaming around…sometimes stumbling, feeling pain and loss, sometimes just collapsing for a bit and crying…and I can see Him waving His arms, encouraging us to look up. Look!! Look what I did for you! Look what I’m doing, what I will do! It doesn’t seem like enough, but I promise you it’s more than enough.

“Love never reasons, but profusely gives; it gives like a thoughtless prodigal its all, and then trembles lest it has done too little.” Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace