Couples, Newton and Love, Twue Love...

Tonight is the first of four "Couples' Nights" we hope to hold at GFC. We had three of these spaced over 3 months last year, but decided to try this new format with the hope of injecting a mother lode of hope, grace and encouragement into our unions.

I was happy to read this quote again today from John Newton concerning his bride after her death. The love they shared was rather remarkable and was used as one of the means to draw Newton to the Saviour.

Call me crazy, but I think I know something of this love for Mrs. Kerux... I shall save that story for another day.

John Newton on his wife Mary (after her death)

“My first regard for her was truly a passion,” he wrote to a friend, Mrs. Coffin, “strong as ever writers of romance imagined. Neither absence, nor distance, nor the unhappy scenes of profligacy in which I was too long engaged, could extinguish it; and from the moment I had a prospect of gaining her, it sprung up with renewed force. At length the Lord gave her to me: we lived together more than forty years in harmony, and, if possible, with increasing affection.”

He described her as “the main hinge upon which all the principal events of my life had turned ... an excellent wife ... my faithful friend, my judicious counsellor; we had but one heart between us.”