Coffee with my friend.

This. Every morning, this. I could wake up seventy thousand more times, roll out of bed, scramble to find a mismatched pair of socks, and throw on an oversized, overworn sweatshirt before hobbling out to the thrift store couch (where no less than four little ones will soon find me) and never tire of it. Because all of that means another morning of coffee with my friend. My friend, is of course, my husband. Sometimes he's my friend. Sometimes I get angry and glare at him. But in the morning, it's all about the love, baby. It's about those few fleeting moments that we get together in the living room before the thumping of little feet across the fir floors. Those few moments where we can wipe the sleep from our eyes, soak in the sunrise, and prepare ourselves for the day ahead. Coffee, for Stuart and I, has always been more than just coffee. It's been our thing. Back in our early days, we'd linger at coffee shops and pretend like the world was all about us and our young love. We had nothing better to do than sip lattes and play chess. (I almost beat him... once. He won't admit it, but it's true.)Now, coffee has become one of our signature signs of service. If you need to ask for forgiveness, you should probably have an Americano in hand. Pile of dirty dishes that your spouse is scrubbing through? That means you're on latte duty. Bad day? "Let me make you a coffee."Stuart will rise out of bed before me each morning and warm up the machine before filling the cups with hot water that steams and twirls in the air. He'll pull a milky, rich, frothy espresso shot.Plurp. Into the hot water it goes. I take mine with a dash of cream. He takes his black. It's how we tell our mugs apart.He'll holler at me from the hallway. "Hey Mama. Coffee's ready.""...you coming? Coffee's hot.""...I'm going to drink your coffee if you don't get up."That one always works. Slipping my hands around the mug, I'll act like I'm super angry I have to get up and out of my warm, tangled bed. But the truth is that I look forward to those first sips and first moments together every single day... all day. Have you ever made an upside down cake that didn't turn out? So when you go to flip it over, instead of falling out of the pan into cake form, it just explodes and spills all over? Pretty much every day of my life is like that. But coffee with my friend in the morning is pre-flipping. It's the cake before the cake explodes. It's hopeful. It's calm. It's wonderous. I'm madly in love with this man of mine. While watching him preach on Sunday, I sat in the back nursing the baby. I was beaming as I stared at him - watching him preach the gospel and his love of the Lord to a congregation full of saints eager to hear the good news. And I thought to myself, "Self. You're the one who gets to wake up and share coffee with him in your pajamas every morning."And then I patted myself on the back because that makes me awesome. It's Sunday night... soon to be Monday morning. Which means that once again, I get to have coffee with my friend. I pray I get to do it a million times over and then some. Happy Sunday, my friends!