The other day we got through the video that Rachael’s mate
Dave had made of our wedding – and we absolutely loved it! I suppose that wasn’t
particularly surprising, because it was a video of our wedding, and we
absolutely loved our wedding. And it reminded me that I have been intending
ever since the wedding to write a blog about why we loved it so much. Now I
realise this has the potential to sound a bit ‘Ooo look at how great my wedding
was, aren’t I great?’ but my thinking is that since a) everything that was good
about it genuinely is thanks to God rather than thanks to us and b) all the
best ideas were Rachael’s and it’s OK to boast about how great I think she is,
and c) everyone thinks that their wedding day is the best day ever, this is a
situation in which it’s actually right to celebrate the things that made us
love the day so much!
And like I say, the really important things that made the
day what it was were all thanks to God rather than us, because we were
borrowing them from a much much bigger wedding. So I’ll just splurge a few
thoughts about the three biggest things we borrowed!
Thing One: Joy
When we sat down a year ago to start planning our wedding,
and we talked about what was important to us, basically the first thing we said
was that we wanted it to be fun! We wanted the primary experience of being a
guest at the wedding not to be feeling impressed, but to be feeling joyful. So
we ended up with loads of outdoor games, bubble swords, mates performing
acoustic music, a tea and toast station, and an ice cream van! We also asked my
friends Dom and Hannah – who are two of the most gifted people we know in the
art of celebration – to bring their band and play for everyone to dance. And it
was class. Dom had even accepted my challenge to do a cover of the Fresh Prince
of Bel Air rap! 
But there was a moment
earlier on in the night when Dom came up to me and said thank you for inviting
them, and then, “you guys really know how to celebrate”, and my heart properly
sang. Because to us that is profound praise. CS Lewis once wrote: “Joy is the
serious business of heaven”. I think that is beautifully true! I believe in God
who revealed himself in Jesus, a man whose first display of miraculous power
was to fuel the exuberant joy of a wedding celebration with gallons more high
quality wine when the supplies had run out! I believe in God who invented music
– created the way your mind and body responds to a good beat or a beautiful
tune; God who when he was crafting humanity in his own image, as a reflection
of what he is like, gave them the bizarre gift of laughter! What is it for? Why
are we creatures that laugh? This strange capacity for the utterly pointless,
utterly glorious sharing of joy. I believe in a God who invented bodies and
hugs and the smell of good food and sunshine and who did all of these things
saying to himself, “This is very good.”
And I believe in a God who describes the fulfilment of his whole creation – the
ultimate future to which his whole intention for the world is headed, the new
everlasting chapter to the story he’s inviting all of us into – as a wedding
feast. As a massive, massive party. So this was the first thing we hoped and
prayed and tried to borrow from that much bigger wedding – the sheer joy of it.
And one of my favourite things was the way that the wedding service in the
church, was every bit as joyful as the party afterwards – because focussing on this God didn’t sap the fun in the slightest:
it just made the fun deeper and richer and full of glory. I’m actually beaming
again even as I think about it now.
Right, moving on…
Thing Two: Care
Thing two is actually one of the biggest things I love and
admire about Rachael, and one of the things I’m most excited about learning
from her now that she’s my wife – she cares
about people, like really, really cares. And a huge part of what she wanted for
the wedding – and obviously once she’d suggested it I agreed! – was that people
should be able to feel that we cared about them and valued them. Mostly this
manifested itself in Rachael spending hours and hours hand calligraphy-ing
people’s names onto their place names, and then between us writing little
messages to everyone that they would get when they sat down at their place.
Now here’s something really cool – we could actually feel
the difference in how people interacted with us after dinner, when they’d read
their messages. There was something new – a new warmth or depth or something –
because people knew that we actually cared about them. And this is what I love about Rachael (amongst many other
things!), is that when I think about it, this is the effect that Rach has on
people all the time! She cares about people, and that is tangible, and when you
know that someone cares about you it actually liberates you to be honest with
them, to be joyful with them or be sad with them, and to care about them too. 
And once again, it’s a gift – I was going to say borrowing
but I’m pretty sure Rachael can keep it – that she’s got from Jesus. Because
if you look at any of the stories of his
life – of God walking around in flesh and skin and interacting with messed up
people – you see exactly that quality. There’s a bit where he’s literally on
his way to save a little girl who is dying, and an old woman who’s had
menstrual bleeding for 18 years reaches out in the crowd and touches his cloak,
and gets healed! And Jesus stops, and asks who it was – he holds up the mission
to save this girl’s life because he wants this woman to know that he actually
cares about her. And when she comes forward, trembling, ashamed, and explains
her story and what has happened, he calls her “Daughter.” And when their
conversation is finished, he goes and raises the little girl from the dead. And
I just love imagining the impact that would have had on that woman, it’s like
the thing with the little place name messages but super-charged: this man who
can heal even dead people, this Giver of Life, this man of literally
world-changing significance, he stopped because he cared about me, wanted to know me. And he called me, “Daughter.”
It must have liberated her just like it liberates me: knowing that God actually
cares about me, genuinely wants to know me,
is what liberates me from ‘religion’ where I’m desperately trying to look
respectable to the Deity, into genuinely having an honest relationship with God
– where I can be joyful with him or angry with him, where I don’t even try to
hide the selfishness and the mess that runs right through me, but instead just
lay out my broken pieces in front of him and ask him to put me back together.
Now actually being married is teaching me so much more about
all of this but this blog is about the wedding itself, so on we go…
Thing Three: Love
This is a fairly obvious component in a wedding, isn’t it? But
it’s also the root that the other two things grow from. And it’s the maybe the
root that goes deepest back into the bigger wedding. Actually there was a bit
from one of the Bible readings we had, which me and my brother were praying
about on the morning and meant so much to me:
“As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God
rejoice over you.”
Those are just incredible words – and whether or not right
now you trust that the Bible is telling us the truth, I hope you’ll agree that
if that was true, that would be amazing news! Because that says that the insane
level of delight that I felt in Rachael, the unstoppable joy in her, in who she
was, in loving her, in giving myself to her forever, that made that day the
best day of my life – is a taste of how God feels about me. How God feels about
any one of us who agrees to be his bride!
It’s a quirk of my personality that I love the feeling of
realising you are inside a really good metaphor – but this has got to be the
best of all. Jesus is always using this metaphor of him as the Groom and his
people as the Bride. And this is why my favourite moment in the whole thing was
a bit that me and Rachael said to each other in the ceremony. There’s a place
where you each say to the other:
“All that I am I give to you, all that I have I share with
you.”
Of course that is a very beautiful thing in and of itself:
you are giving yourself freely as a gift to the other person, all that you are
and everything you have. And the thing that makes that so poignant is that yes,
it is the beautiful bits of yourself that you’re giving, but it’s not just
those bits. I’ve given Rachael my tongue-numbling-ly limited range of cooking
abilities. And I’ve given her all of my arrogance, and all of my careless
self-centredness. I’ve given her all of the parts of me that I hardly let
myself see let alone anyone else.
And yet, incredibly, she has received all that. She has
knowingly, willingly, received all the lights and the shadows in me and said,
essentially, “I take you – all of you, right down to the bitter depths – to be
my husband, and I will always love you, whatever it takes, and I will never
leave you.” And there’s no point even trying to write a sentence about how
glorious that is.
But here’s the thing, like everything else that was great
about that day, it was a picture of what He’s like. Except he’s even better.
Because of course when Rachael did that to me, I was doing the same thing with
her, and we both know that the other one won’t always keep those promises
perfectly because the shadows inside us screw things like that up. But when
Jesus says to us, “All that I am I give to you, all that I have I share with
you,” he’s offering something entirely beautiful. He’s offering everything that
he has – overflowing, everlasting life, unstoppably deep peace, joy, patience,
and most of all his place in the family of God: as a beloved child. And he’s
offering everything that he is: the ultimate Lover, the true King, the
ever-faithful Friend. And that’s not even the most glorious bit – the glorious
bit is what his love for us is willing to take.
Because Jesus stands, with his arms wide, wide open,
offering to receive us. All of us. All
the parts of us that we hardly let ourselves see let alone anyone else. He
offers to take into himself the taste of our bitterness, the wounds of our
carelessness, the lash of our anger, the agony of our loneliness and even the loneliness
of our death. He looks at us and says, “I take you – all of you, right down to
the bitter depths – and I will always love you, whatever it takes, and I will
never leave you.”
It’s that love, that ultimate expression of love, that will
fill the ultimate, everlasting wedding celebration between Jesus and us with
all of its exuberant, unstoppable joy. Because that kind of love sets you
utterly free to celebrate! And that was what me and Rachael were so deeply
hoping everyone would get a taster of at our wedding:
“As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God
rejoice over you.”
