On Christmas Eve, 33 years ago today, I am sure I was being abundantly spoiled. Knowing how my family acts around Christmas, I’m certain I was being doted on and receiving way too many toys for a one year old. And yet, God was doing the most spoiling!

Second only to God’s grace to me in Christ, He was bringing into the world the greatest gift I have ever received. In Winter Garden, Florida, Rachel Danae Hoffmann was born. Danae is the most vivid example of the love and sacrifice of Jesus in my life.

As Charles Spurgeon once said of his wife, Susannah:

I have been thinking over my strange history, and musing on eternal love’s great river-head from which such streams of mercy have flowed to me. . . . Think of the love which gave me that dear lady for a wife, and made her such a wife; to me, the ideal wife, and, as I believe, without exaggeration or love-flourishing, the precise form in which God would make a woman for such a man as I am, if He designed her to be the greatest of all earthly blessings to him; and in some sense a spiritual blessing, too, for in that also am I richly profited by you, though you would not believe it. I will leave this ‘good matter’ ere the paper is covered; but not till I have sent you as many kisses as there are waves on the sea.

Happy Birthday Danae! You are the greatest of all earthly blessings to me!