Psalm 147:3 — He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.

As I sat in the chapel with Myra this morning, for our Bible and Life Group, the beautiful stained glass window caught my eye. It reminded me of something from our past.
There was a time when I was asked to talk about the relationship between myself and Myra. And truly, it is a wonderful thing.
In our different ways, we both had broken lives. In my case it started with a broken childhood. My parents had separated before my teenage years, and other difficulties had frozen my ability to build proper relationships. Later I married a nice girl. For a while we worked hard to have a good marriage — but we didn’t know what we were doing. After about ten years it was clear that we wanted different things from our marriage and our lives, and didn’t know what to do about it. Like so many others, we divorced and, once again, I froze. Like a pane of glass, the life that I envisaged for myself lay shattered in sharp, dangerous pieces.
Myra’s story was different, but in the end the results were much the same. She left school young, worked hard, had fun and then made the mistake so many young women made — and married the wrong man. In less than two years she was on her own, with a young baby to take care of. A second marriage followed, to a man that Myra could love and make a life with. Sadly he was struck with terrible illness, and after Myra had nursed him for many years he died. There was Myra, her life in pieces around her — another shattered pane of glass.
It was a perfect setup! Myra, a lonely Christian woman praying for the right man. Me, a frozen confused man with a hunger for God hidden within me, afraid to show any real feelings. What would we do?
What we did was the most ridiculous thing in the world! We both signed up for a “teletext” dating service (think of it as what went before internet dating)! Somehow two wildly different people, living fifty miles apart, were matched up and met. Two lonely people, shy and slow to share, took one look at each other and fell completely (truly, madly, deeply!) in love.
It took Myra seven years to get me to propose. Then life was a whirlwind. Within two years we were married, moved to America, attending church regularly and growing together in faith. God was picking up those broken pieces of glass and building a new stained glass window — a relationship with many beautiful facets!
God is such an artist! He has an imagination and creativity that no human mind could aspire too!
In the last twelve years we have been through quite a few things. We hoped to join a ministry — it didn’t work out. My job has brought some special challenges. We have been grieved by an inability to sustain a loving family relationship with our children and grandchildren. Challenges abound. Each has built another piece into the beautiful stained glass window.
I don’t know why this came into my mind this morning — but it strikes me that so many couples nowadays are like me and my first wife. They don’t know what they’re doing, and when things go wrong the relationship shatters. If you know somebody like that, do you think you could tell them about God and stained glass windows?