A Wedding Announcement – Save the Date!

People still get married.

I find that amazing.

God designed us with a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for individual hope. Think about it. We’ve all seen marriages up close. We know that most of them begin with the greatest plans and lofty expectations but then get bogged down – as if every husband or wife was on the writing staff of Lost.

We know how to start off with spectacular promise but sustaining that through projectile vomit, mortgage payments, everyday underpants, and leftovers is nothing short of Red Sea parting miraculous. A few pull it off with seamless grace but most , well, most wouldn’t seem likely to inspire other humans to follow suit.

But our children still get married.

Some of them enter their twenties as cynics, vowing to be lone wolves and to never become prey to romantic illusions but then, one night, they find themselves howling at the moon and then they hear someone howling on another hill and . . .well, maybe they’ll try being lone wolves together.

This phenomenon in itself should be proof of God.

If evolution sloughs off what we do not need then romantic illusions should have gone the way of flippers and gills back in Darwin’s mythic stone age. I mean, isn’t the human race all grown up and savvy now? Don’t we get how foolish it is to believe that one man promising to love one woman forever will ever end happily ever after?

Nope.

We never get it.

Maybe some are so broken, so damaged, so caught in bondage that they have given up. And some others are chosen by God to eschew a singular connection in marriage and remain celibate and one. But most of us keep jumping like Noah’s lemmings, two-by-two off the cliff of “I do.”, believing every time that we will beat the odds.

Doesn’t that help you to believe in God?

We are made in His image.

He is a God of romance. He is a God who believes. He says that love “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” And then John says that God is love. So God always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

God is no cynic.

God is an eternal romantic. Look at the moon, at spring, at new babies, at women, at athletes, at poets, at the ocean, the mountains, the desert, a storm. He is prone to grand gestures, to beauty , to grandeur and He holds back nothing. He doesn’t protect Himself. He opens Himself up to us. He is all in and He awaits our response.

People still get married.

They gaze across a room, drawn somehow to the other. They stumble through initial introductions and eventually they touch hands, touch hearts, mingling hopes and desires to the point where they are believers in what shouldn’t make any sense at all any more.

And there they stand with witnesses who decide that they, too, will believe, despite all they know. They will believe with this couple and maybe they will believe again for themselves.

No wonder marriage speaks of the mystery of the Godhead of Christ and the church. It is as mysterious as it is romantic as it is enduring through centuries of embattled debate.

People still get married.

Doesn’t that just make you believe in God?

Hey, wait a minute, Jesus performed His first miracle at a wedding, turning water into wine. That’s got to mean something, doesn’t it?

I think it does.

“Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” Revelation 21:1-3

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