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Four Years

Today is my (our) fourth wedding anniversary!  It's not all that many years, in the grand scheme of things, but they've certainly been full years.

I have to admit that my wedding day was not all I'd hoped and dreamed.  I was working some 50 hours a week (with no time to plan a wedding), my fiance was living in another state, my best friends were scattered across the country, I came down with a ridiculous sinus infection the week before the wedding, and all in all I simply couldn't get everything done by myself.  When I'm not careful, I look back on that day and see:

  • the wedding dress that wouldn't stay in place despite the $250 I spent to have it "perfectly" altered
  • a fellowship hall nearly to dark to see in, because I never got the needed extension cords for the Christmas lights we (or, rather, my tall friend Ryan) so painstakingly strung up the day before, and it didn't occur to me to simply flip a light switch
  • my dear friend running from the hair salon to CVS repeatedly (it wasn't open yet on the first two trips) to get me some cold medicine, which put me into quite the mental fog for the rest of the day
  • lukewarm soup, because serving hot soup to 250 people was an impossible goal given our resources
  • my dad, white as a sheet and disappearing to the bathroom to battle the stomach flu all through the ceremony and reception
  • "forcing" everyone closest to me to stick around for hours after the reception to tear everything down, because I neglected to designate anyone to prepare the church for Sunday morning's services
But if I strip off the perfectionist, detail-oriented me and look a little closer, I see:
  • my fiance-becoming-husband tearing up at the beautiful descriptions of Christ and his bride-church from our reading out of Revelation
  • everyone I love (and a hundred people I'd never met) singing our favorite hymns, ending with an a capella doxology the simply stirred the soul
  • capturing exactly the feel I wanted by using only violin and guitar for instrumentation
  • a hot chocolate bar (peppermint stick stirrers!  chocolate-dipped spoons!) and endless plates of Christmas cookies
  • half a dozen church ladies devoting countless hours to overseeing my ridiculous ideas for lunch
Most of the rest of it is lost in the cold-medicine-induced fog, but really, who remembers a lot of their wedding day anyway?  It's so not the day that matters: it's the days and days afterwards, living out the promises made in  one short afternoon.  And those, by and large, have been very good days.


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  1. Katey December 27, 2011 at 9:16 PM

    I really liked singing O Come O Come Emmanuel at your wedding. So much richness in combining the symbolism of anticipating a wedding with Advent, etc.

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