Live in Love: Growing Together Through Life's Changes

by Lauren Akins

this isn’t the first time God’s led me to the edge of a cliff and told me to jump with faith into the unknown.

I hope it’s a reminder that having faith is a good thing, that a healthy marriage is a good thing, that standing up for one another is a good thing, and that valuing one another as human beings is a very good thing. And my greatest hope is that it inspires you to seek out your own good things, while you love, love, love on the people in your life.

A happy marriage, a happy career, a happy life—it’s all possible. Living the dream is possible. But it doesn’t get handed to you. It takes time. It takes faith. It takes effort. It takes making good choices, and making tough choices, too.

Of course, life isn’t always simple. It doesn’t matter how much you try to keep it simple, either. Life gets complicated. And it seems to get more and more complicated the older you get. Finding a way to hold on to the life you have, or to get to the life you want—a life that matters to you and holds meaning for you, no matter what that life may be—that’s where the challenges lie. And I think one of the biggest lessons I learned growing up is that, thankfully, none of us have to face those challenges alone.

you never really know who you’re not paying attention to, right now. You can just never know who might end up being really important to you later in life.

“Nobody’s perfect! We all mess up.”

those mistakes are the things that teach us some pretty important life lessons—and sometimes the things that go wrong are just God stepping in to try to lead us in a better direction.

“And so maybe, when things go wrong in our lives,” he said, “we ought to be grateful, and to think about how those bad things might actually be pointing us toward something much better.”

God answers prayers. He listens. He’s listening right now, I thought. God’s listening.

I already knew that God was listening. I knew that He answered prayers. I just had to remember that I needed to be ready to answer to Him, too.

To truly love someone sometimes means giving them the benefit of the doubt; the grace to allow them to have and express and live out what may be a very different perspective from yours, simply because it’s theirs.

The things you worry about, the things you think might be a problem, the things you focus on and stress over—sometimes those aren’t the things that wind up hurting you at all. Sometimes, things come at you out of the blue. Things you never imagined.