Beezy … I never thought this day would come. I have dreamed of it from the day I expressed my desire for you even though we have been friends for a long time before then. Until now, it has only been as a soft whisper of glorious things, beautiful things to come that I could not imagine it then. But oh, how that whisper stirred in me a longing for this day and kindled in me a desire to know no other days, if only I might know this one! And at long last, it is here!

Our wedding day is upon us, and I realize that it is not this day alone that I have longed for, but for all the days to follow when we will be united together in a divine union, never to part in this life but to live all our days inseparably bound together—and what a great joy and sweet delight it will be! Bertha, there are no adequate words to express the joy welling up inside me. That God should look upon me, a wretch in my own ways, with the unmerited favor of a son and delight to give to me the most beautiful woman in all the earth makes me to stand in awestruck wonder of His infinite grace and boundless goodness! You truly are the most beautiful and the most beautiful by far to me, sweet girl. Your beauty is inexhaustible and unfading because it flows from a deep inner spring that is rich with a love for Christ, and I am overjoyed that I will spend a lifetime discovering its fullness and exploring its depths, though I am sure that there is such abundant beauty within you that there will be beauty still unknown to me the day I depart from this life. I am so desperate for a bountiful measure of God’s grace. I have been entrusted with a task too great for me, for in my own strength I cannot love you as our Lord loves His bride. Yet that is my desire—to love you out of the endless love with which Christ has loved me, to consider your needs above my own as Christ has considered my dire estate in sin and stepped down from Heaven to rescue me, to strive always, even at great cost to myself, for your good as Christ has striven to take hold of me, to love and cherish you unto death as Christ has loved me even through the unthinkable pains of Calvary, and to lead you into the arms of the Father to find that which is truly life as Christ, in His death, burial, resurrection, and ascension has reconciled me to the Father whom I once hated in my sin but now I love because He first loved me.