WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO, GOT TO DO WITH IT?

My wife is hot. We've established that here before. Not hot for a mom of three kids or for a woman in her mid thirties. My wife is just flat out hot. To me even the imperfections she sees in herself are cute quirks that make her, you know, hot.

And she's brilliant. She earned a masters in finance and became a CPA. She audited entertainment companies for a large accounting firm for a while and later crunched numbers for a global telecommunications corporation, helping to oversee the way the company accounted for things when mergers and acquisitions occurred. Yea, that kind of brilliant.

And she's creative too. She thinks up art projects for our kids and home made gifts for our friends and cheap decorating ideas for our house like Martha Stewart on a shoestring budget.

And she's a teacher. Just this week she taught my five year-old the meaning of the word "envy" when she asked - the question stumped me. She taught me how to balance a check book and invest in the stock market. She's able to take complex ideas and processes and explain them in a non-condescending way to just about anyone who wants to know. And it's usually fun.

She's tender hearted, the kind of friend who'd cancel a haircut to go give blood for your cousin's surgery on a moment's notice, or cook for you for a whole month while you recover from having that baby. She mourns roadkill. She rescues kittens from shelters and donates time to help children and money to help the abused and poor.

And her laugh is contagious. God gave her a huge smile and a diverse generous sense of humor. She's not so much the one making the jokes but she can make anyone with a joke think they're the funniest person who's ever lived.

She's an optimist. Always able to see the good in every person and situation. And patient, able to endure difficult people and situations much longer than a mere mortal.

My wife is more than hot. Hot is only skin deep. She's amazing. More amazing? She loves me.

That's a miracle.

You might be thinking: Beautiful, compassionate, funny, smart people get married all the time so what's the big deal that she married you? It's no miracle. A stretch maybe, but no miracle. And you might think this because, well, I've got good hair, I'm sometimes funny, I'm not perfect but, you know, I'm somewhat employed and I brush on a regular basis and...Well, I'm no super model or Nobel prize winner for sure but it's not complete fantasy to think a woman like Becky would marry a man like me - you might think.

You might also think, and Shaun, you're a rock star...ok, a minor soft rock star, but a musician nonetheless. I've seen the pictures with the expensive haircut and the makeup. Rock star. And let's be honest here, you people have a knack for marrying out of your league. Billy joel. Rick Ocasek. It's your inheritance as a musician to marry someone so incredible as to give the unattractive underachieving masses incentive to be in the band or take piano lessons. It's what you people do, you could be thinking.

But you can think all this only because you don't know who I really am (nothing like my album covers), or who I was when Becky met me (not a musician yet), and definitely not who I was all those years before her. If you knew that you'd call Becky falling for me a miracle like I do. Shoot, you'd call Becky ever talking to me a miracle.

It's miraculous that Becky started loving me when I was an almost unlovable jerk obsessed with politics and self-centered and unconfident and judgmental and whiny and acne infested and nineteen. Her love for me then is a true testament to the depth of her patience, optimism and tender-heartedness. And her love for me now is still miraculous, in part, because my memory of who I was when it began is still intact.

The conference I'm teaching this weekend, starting tonight, was named Love: A Remix long before I signed on to teach at it. And they wanted me to teach - surprise - the beatitudes. My problem was I didn't really know what love, the way we usually talk about it and I've always thought about it, had to do with those eight blessings. I get that God loves us and so we love others by showing mercy and making peace and paying the ultimate price for doing so in being persecuted. But that's three of the eight. What about the other five? What about the first two: poverty of spirit (sin) and mourning (grief over sin)? How does that tie into this theme of love, and do it in a way that matters to a bunch of college students?

And Becky's the answer I think, or Becky's love for me is. If we skip poverty of spirit and mourning and jump straight to how much God loves us now - all forgiven and accepted and shiny and new and lovable - we miss the miraculous I think. God's love for me now is great for sure. But how much greater is God's love for me when my memory is refreshed and I recall that when He first loved me I was a tearful beggar. That's miraculous.

More at the conference in Clemmons, North Carolina tonight.