Contents

• A Gift Words Struggle To Carry
• The Beginning Of Our Story
• Years Of Distance And Waiting
• The Early Years Of Marriage
• Growing Side By Side Under The Word
• Learning To Shepherd The Home
• Ordinary Faithfulness
• The Earthly Rock And The True Rock

There are gifts the Lord gives that words struggle to carry. Some mercies are so personal, so woven into the fabric of daily life, that attempting to describe them feels almost too intimate for public view. Yet Scripture calls us to remember the Lord’s kindness, to give thanks in all things, and to testify of His goodness. So I write these words not to draw attention to myself, but to honor the God who looked upon a man in great need and gave him a wife of quiet strength, steady loyalty, and enduring grace.

Sabrina, my Sweet Sunshine, this is for you.

I want you to know, plainly and without reservation, how deeply I love you. I want you to know how continually grateful I am to the Lord for you. And I want you to know what a profound privilege it is to be your husband. To love you. To walk beside you through ordinary days and harder seasons. To aid, however imperfectly, in your sanctification as you have so often aided in mine. To grow together in Christ. To raise our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. And to be, by God’s grace, the earthly rock you have so often called me.

The Lord writes stories that rarely match the tidy plans we make for ourselves. Ours began in a simple way. In late May of 2010, through an online game site, a connection formed that neither of us could have predicted. You were still young. I was already carrying more weight and more blindness than I understood. Within days we were talking for hours. By early June I had told you I loved you, and a long-distance relationship began that would stretch across years and many miles. You lived in Fairfax, Virginia. I moved through different places in North Carolina and Tennessee, with a brief stretch farther north. Through all of it we kept talking.

We spoke of music and families, of school and friends, of your grandmother and Myrtle Beach, of the challenges in your home, and of the future we hoped to build. We dreamed of marriage and children long before either felt close at hand. We gave each other names that still belong to us. I was your Tiger. You were my Sweet Sunshine. Those names have remained a quiet thread through every season since.

On your eighteenth birthday, June 21, 2014, the long distance finally ended. My parents and I came for you, and you came with us to Tennessee. After years of screens and distance, we could finally share ordinary moments, simple affection, and the beginnings of a home.

Looking back, I see the Lord’s hand preserving both of us through those years. He was kind when we did not yet know how to seek Him rightly. And He was already preparing a young woman whose loyalty and quiet strength would one day steady a man who had very little strength of his own.

Marriage reveals both the beauty and the brokenness of two people. In the early years of our life together, you saw more of my weaknesses than most people ever will. You knew the habits that pulled my attention and energy away from you and from our home. You never shared those habits. You had no desire for them. Yet you stayed. You remained present when presence cost you something. You continued to hope when hope felt thin.

I think often of the weight you carried in those seasons. The birth of our first son, Tony James, on June 12, 2015, brought a joy that still stands vivid in my memory. Holding him for the first time marked something deep in me, even if change came slowly. Then came our daughter Sabrina Salomea Glover on June 12, 2017. Less than a week after her arrival we moved to care for your grandmother in her final season. The house filled with the needs of a newborn, a toddler, and an aging loved one who required constant care. You met those needs with a patience that often outstripped mine. I watched it. I benefited from it. I did not always have eyes to see how much the Lord was using you in those days.

There was also the quiet grief of 2019, when we lost a child before we could hold him or her. The silence of that loss settled heavily on both of us. Later the Lord gave us Hope Grace Glover, born March 19, 2023, at Grand Strand Hospital in Myrtle Beach. She was our rainbow baby, a living reminder that the Lord restores what sorrow has taken. And then came Joy Faith Glover, born April 3, 2026, in the peace of our own home. Each of these children has been an undeserved gift. Through every birth and every hard stretch between them, you have been steady. Your strength has rarely been loud. It has simply been present, day after day.

I look back on those years with both gratitude and sober reflection. Gratitude that the Lord sustained our family. Reflection on how much of the daily load you carried while I was still learning what it meant to love you well. You were not the cause of my shortcomings. You were one of the clearest evidences of God’s patience toward me while I remained in them. You saw the darkness and still chose to stay. That choice was not small. It was grace made visible.

One of the greatest kindnesses the Lord has given our marriage is the way He has taught us to grow side by side. For a long time our conversations centered on the immediate pressures of life, the next need, the next difficulty, the next plan. Over time the center shifted. We began talking more about the Lord, about what we were reading in Scripture, about the sermons that were shaping us, about the hard questions that arise when two people try to follow Christ in the ordinary places of marriage and parenthood.

Those evening conversations, after the children were settled, became a quiet gift. We did not always understand everything at once. We wrestled with difficult passages. We prayed. We returned to the same questions on different days. In the process we learned something precious: the Christian life is not meant to be lived in isolation, and neither is Christian marriage. The Lord uses a husband and wife to sharpen one another, to encourage one another, and to keep pointing one another back to Christ when the path feels unclear.

We found a local church that took the Scriptures seriously. We were welcomed, taught, and shepherded. We began to see that the Christian life is largely made of ordinary faithfulness: gathering with God’s people, sitting under the Word, praying, singing, serving, repenting, and continuing on. None of it looked dramatic. All of it proved steadying. And it began to reshape our home.

I felt the weight of passages like Ephesians 5 and Deuteronomy 6, the qualifications in the pastoral epistles that paint a picture of the kind of household every Christian husband should desire by God’s grace. Providing for a family is necessary and good, yet it is not the same as shepherding a family. Physical presence and a paycheck matter, but they are not the whole of the calling. The Lord has been teaching me that leadership in the home is meant to look increasingly like Christ’s leadership of the church: patient, self-giving, truthful, and marked by a willingness to lay down preference for the good of another. You have walked through that learning with me. You have not demanded perfection. You have simply remained present while the Lord continues His slow and faithful work.

The children the Lord has entrusted to us do not ultimately belong to us. They belong to Him. He gives them. He sustains them. He numbers their days. He places them in our care for a season so that we might point them to the only Savior who can give them life. That truth has changed the way I see our role as parents, and it has deepened my gratitude for you.

Tony, Sabrina, Hope, and Joy are each unique. Each one carries a different mixture of personality, need, and promise. Raising them in the discipline and instruction of the Lord is not a task that can be completed in a single season. It is the long work of opening Scripture in the home, praying together, correcting with patience, encouraging with hope, and modeling repentance when we fall short. It is teaching them that the greatest gift we can give them is not a comfortable life or a respected name, but a clear and consistent witness to Christ.

You have carried so much of the daily reality of that work. The unseen hours of care, the patience required when little hearts are restless, the steady presence that makes a home feel safe. Your example has often taught our children more than any formal lesson could. I have watched you love them in ways that reflect the quiet strength the Lord has given you. I have also watched you forgive me when my own remaining selfishness has made the work harder than it needed to be. That forgiveness has been part of the grace that holds our family together.

We have learned that family worship does not require polished performance. It requires faithfulness. Opening the Bible even when the children are distracted. Praying even when the day has been long. Speaking of the Lord in the ordinary moments of driving, eating, and settling down for the night. Over time those ordinary practices become part of the atmosphere of the home. Scripture stops being something reserved for Sunday and becomes part of the air we breathe. You have been essential to that atmosphere. Your willingness to grow with me, to learn alongside me, and to keep pointing our children toward Christ has been one of the greatest stabilizers in our life together.

You have called me your earthly rock. I do not take those words lightly. I know my own weakness too well to pretend that I am sufficient in myself. Any stability I have been able to offer has come from the One who is the true Rock, the One who never changes and never fails. Yet by His grace He has allowed me to be a place of safety for you in a world that is often unsafe. He has allowed me to stand with you through moves, through financial pressures, through the care of aging loved ones, through grief, through the ordinary strains of life with young children, and through the slower work of learning what it means to trust Him more fully with what He has given us.

I want to be the kind of husband who makes it easier for you to trust the Lord, not harder. I want my presence in your life to be a reminder of His faithfulness rather than a source of additional weight. I want my words to build up rather than tear down. I want my leadership to look less like control and more like service. I still fall short of these desires. Pride still rises. Selfishness still speaks. Old patterns still try to reassert themselves. But there is now a different direction in my heart. There is resistance where once there was only surrender to self. There is repentance where once there was only self-justification. And in that ongoing work, you have been both a means of grace and a fellow traveler.

Christian marriage is not the story of two people who finally become strong enough for each other. It is the story of two weak people who keep looking to the same Savior. It is the daily practice of forgiveness, the slow learning of self-forgetfulness, and the shared hope that Christ will finish the work He has begun in both of us. I am thankful that the Lord did not leave me to walk that path alone. He gave me you.

The longer I walk with Christ, the more clearly I see that every good gift in our life together has come from His hand. You are one of those gifts. Your patience when I was still blind to so much. Your presence in the hard days. Your willingness to grow with me under the Word. Your quiet strength in the daily work of motherhood. Your prayers. Your forgiveness. Your decision, again and again, to remain.

I am not the man I once was. I am not yet the man I will be. But Christ is faithful. He began the work. He continues the work. And He will finish it. One of the clearest evidences of His faithfulness in my life is the wife He gave me.

Sabrina, I love you. Not as perfectly as I ought. Not as fully as I will when every remaining trace of selfishness is finally gone. But by the grace of God, I do. I am grateful to the Lord for you every day. It is an astonishing privilege to be your husband, to love you, to seek your good, to walk with you in the slow work of sanctification, to grow together in Christ, to raise our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, and to be, as long as He gives me breath, the earthly rock you can lean on while we both lean on the true Rock.

You are my Sweet Sunshine. You always have been. And every good thing in our life together comes from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

Your Tiger

Soli Deo Gloria.