from the wedding hater

I have never made it a secret that I am not a fan of weddings, including my own actual wedding day... so much fake smiling! I am, however, in love with my husband and my MARRIAGE! I know I've said this before, but I believe if more people wanted to have marriages than weddings that our culture would be a better one.

On the eve of a wedding that I am in, I have been doing my normal pre-wedding whining... about everything from the dress I have to wear that I had no say in to having to pretend like it's the biggest day ever in the bride's life and mine to the aforementioned fake smiling. Then I completely randomly stumbled upon a description of a wedding that - seriously this is going to shock you - I wish I could have experienced... and I don't even know this girl!

Here's a couple excerpts in case you don't want to read an entire post about someone's wedding who you don't know...

"Ron did a call for single people to recommit their life and surrender their relationships to him, he then did a call for husbands to take the hand of their wife and lead out in reconnecting their marriage covenant with God, and he did a call for people that are still trying to figure God out and dont really know what it means in their life yet. People LINED UP!!! and quietly had communion with their family or by themselves under the chuppah. They spend about 1 minute each just standing under the visual of God’s love and reconnecting their life to His. It was a very powerful moment."

and

"Okay and the BEST part of that day was the stories that we heard from what happened during that worship and communion time. There were people that took communion for the first time, there were people explaining to others what it really meant to take communion and to have a relationship with christ, and there were marriages being healed. We also heard a story about one of our quests whose battling aggressive cancer. During this time of worship a small group of close friends took the inititiative to lay hands on our friend and pray for her healing. It was a powerful time. I honestly didn’t know how people were going to respond but Brian looked at me and told me that he really felt that God wanted us to do this. haha. Uhh… there was no questioning it at that point. I loved how our wedding was not just about us getting married.. it was ultimately an expression of God’s deep love for His people and we were able to leave space for Him to do his restoring work in the lives of some of the people (and marriages) we love the most."

The way she describes their wedding reaching out to married couples, the single people, and even those who don't have Jesus yet inspired me. So many weddings are too much about women becoming obsessed with a perfect day in their lives and not enough about setting off on an adventure of always putting God into our marriages. Maybe I could hate weddings a little less if I thought of them in this way...