Weddings and Remberings

Weddings seem to have a way of inviting you to remember.  While you go to celebrate and honor a couple, they have a way of calling you to reflection.  They stir up feelings of romance and the kind of mushy, gooey love that oozes out of you when you're lost in blissful happiness.  I know for some, they can invite feelings of pain, disappointment or shame - anger even.  Regardless, weddings have a way of triggering the deep places in our hearts that desire intimacy and relationship and the really, real kind of love that we all so desperately crave.

When I was young, I found myself dreaming of my own day and wondering who I would marry.  I would imagine what he would look like and what kind of frilly ball gown I might wear.  Weddings now make me reflect on the beginnings of my own love.  The day I walked down the aisle and said my own vows and promsied forever and for better and for worse.

Todd and I attended a wedding yesterday for a precious couple.  He promised to love her in the valleys and not just on the mountaintops; he vowed he would always be listening to her heart.  She promised to respect him and make their home a plce of rest and peace, and to turn towards him and not away.  Their personal vows brought me to tears and I found myself squeezing the hand of my husband as we listened and watched and celebrated this couple who committed to a covenant of forever.

Later on in the evening, Todd and I danced and spun around the dance floor.  And that man, the one I said I do to over eight years ago, looked at me the same way he did the day we got married.  I always catch my breath when I see him looking at me that way, because it feels impossible to still feel that loved by him when we've lived so much life together.  Especially because I know where I have hurt and disappointed him, where I almost gave up on him, where I have turned away from his touch or embrace time and again. 

During one of our dances together, the photographer came up to us and commented that we were lovely to watch.  She asked us to step into the light where the sun was streaming through the windows because there was something she wanted to capture.  All of that struck me - that we were lovely, that we had been seen, that were asked to step into the light.  Us.  Our dance.  Our love.

I received my husband's loving gaze and my arms held tight around his neck.  And we were remembered and we laughed and smiled and held on to the love we still have, the love that has grown, the love yet to be.  And we danced.  Autumn's sunlight spilling in and pouring over.