We attended a wedding this weekend.

A wedding we felt privileged to attend.  (Remember our buddies who turned shaved ice and flavors into a career?)

There was a giant field and a big open barn and a view of a mountain in the background.  A hot cocoa and coffee bar was set up and a table full of candy and sweets and piled high with delicious cookies.

Music was the dominant theme to the gathering.  Well, more accurately, worship was the dominant theme.  Worship of a holy and creative and imaginative God with a lot of people who loved two young adults plunging into a new life together.  One of my favorite voices was singing and leading us.  ( I love to hear Jamal sing. His voice is all kinds of pleasant.)

The ceremony was unique and reflected truly the nature of the two unique people joining forces.  It was honorable and charming and I was honored and pleased to sit in that barn in December temperatures.  (Which were miraculously mild ish.)

It was lovely and pure and innocent and yeah – maybe for two seconds while the bride was walking down the aisle while wearing her Chuck Taylors to meet a groom at the the other end wearing his Chuck Taylors I thought to my over forty year old self, My word – they’re babies.  Just babies getting married and I was a little reminded of myself as a Chuck Taylor wearing bride to a Chuck Taylor wearing groom that I had, in fact, also been just a baby as well on my own muggy August wedding day in a field more than two decades ago.

But mostly, pretty much entirely (minus those two seconds), instead I thought about the bride and the groom under that tin roof with their hopes and their dreams and their promises and their ideas and their vows and their faith.

And I loved them for all of it.  The surety and the lack of the knowing what the future holds.  The hand holding and the looking forward together.  Their commitment and their obvious overflowing joy and their fun and their spunk and their union of two lives.

May I never grow so old,
may I never grow so jaded,
may I never grow so cynical,

that the uniting of two brave souls no longer moves me.

May I never grow so old,
may I never grow so jaded,
may I never grow so cynical,

that I don’t embrace the wonder and the mystery and the commitment and the love and the hope that it requires to take that leap of both faith and decision.  

Despite the circumstances of my own life’s love story, I believe in love.  

I believe in hope.
I believe in beauty.

I believe in the power of the value of the institution we call marriage.

I believe in the force of the bond and the holy of the calling and the lovely of the sharing.

And I always want to find myself cheering hope on and caring for the promises people I love make to one another.

Let me never mock marriage – the effort it requires to get there and the effort it requires to remain there.

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