Archives For wedding

What a year it’s been

November 6, 2012 — 4 Comments

Last November 5, on the eve of my wedding, I posted an excerpt from Frederick Buechner’s Whistling in the Dark (HarperSanFrancisco). Today, on our one-year anniversary, I share it again:

They say they will love, comfort, honour each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it but even – for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health – when they don’t feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they make at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other’s burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly, than they are to unbind legally. The question is: what do they get in return?

They get each other in return. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping their rash, quixotic promises, they never have to face the world quite alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they’re lucky, even after the first passion passes, they still have a kindness and patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get through the night with, to wake into the new day beside. If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don’t have children, they each become each other’s child.

They both still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.

It’s been a great year, Katie, and we’re just getting started. Te quiero, mi amor!

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The Meaning of Marriage

January 18, 2012 — Leave a comment

On October 31, marriage was in the news: Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphreys were getting divorced. It was a sad spectacle, and though celebrity marriages aren’t exactly known for their longevity, at 72 days this one’s brevity got people talking. “I hope everyone understands this was not an easy decision,” Kardashian said in a statement. “I had hoped this marriage was forever, but sometimes things don’t work out as planned. We remain friends and wish each other the best.”

Less than a week later, surrounded by our families and many of our closest friends at a little garden oasis in North Phoenix, Katie and I made audacious promises to each other: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.”

Today is day 73, and by God’s grace, we’re just getting started.

In that week between October 31 and November 6, as it happens, Timothy and Kathy Keller published their book The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (Dutton). My good friend and groomsman Barnabas gave us the book as a gift.

The book is remarkable in all the ways that books on relationships and marriage so often fall flat. Tim and Kathy have no patience for clichés, but instead share their wisdom rooted in three significant things: 37 years of marriage; more than 20 years of ministry in a city (NYC) and a church (Redeemer) largely made up of single people; and last but not least, the Bible’s teachings on the meaning of marriage, and what it has to do with all of us. In the introduction, they write:

It is hard to get a good perspective on marriage. We all see it through the inevitably distorted lenses of our own experience. If you came from an unusually stable home, where your parents had a great marriage, that may have “made it look easy” to you, and so when you get to your own marriage you may be shocked by how much it takes to forge a lasting relationship. On the other hand, if you have experienced a bad marriage of a divorce, either as a child or an adult, your view of marriage may be overly wary and pessimistic. You may be too expectant of relationship problems and, when they appear, be too ready to say, “Yup, here it goes,” and to give up. In other words, any kind of background experience of marriage may make you ill equipped for it yourself.

That may seem like a bit of a downer, but really I think it emphasizes that none of us can assume that a good marriage just happens automatically, and neither can any of us assume that a great marriage is out of the realm of possibility. Throughout the book they show how marriage is designed to be, and indeed can be, great. As a marriage newbie, I didn’t read the book to critique it so much as to soak it in and learn from it, so I won’t dissect it point by point here. Instead, I’ll simply recommend it as what seems to me to be an honest, encouraging, well-informed and well-rounded book for all of us, single or married, old or young.

I particularly appreciated Keller’s interview about the book on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in November.

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I love how he re-frames some predictable (and, yes, leading) questions from the panel, refusing to play the culture wars blame game while also challenging the nearly universal assumption that marriage is designed primarily for our own self-fulfillment. As he writes in the book, marriage is “difficult and painful — yet rewarding and wondrous.”

I’m glad I read the book so early on in marriage, and I plan to return to it again and again.

For more, check out this one-hour conversation with Tim and Kathy, as they discuss the themes of the book and tell stories from their own experience.

[Photo credit: TimothyKeller.com]

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The wedding day

November 5, 2011 — 6 Comments

When I wake up in the morning it will be Katie’s and my wedding day, which means at least two things: (1) I get to marry the most amazing person I know, and (2) we both get a break from the onslaught of details which have consumed so much of our time in recent days, weeks and months. These are two very, very good things.

I’ll be unplugged for the next week or so, but I thought I’d leave this blog with a quote from one of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner. Of marriage, he had this to say (and though I first read it in his actual book Whistling in the Dark, it’s packed away at the moment, so I share this courtesy of a blog I found containing the quote in full):

They say they will love, comfort, honour each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it but even – for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health – when they don’t feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they make at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other’s burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly, than they are to unbind legally. The question is: what do they get in return?

They get each other in return. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping their rash, quixotic promises, they never have to face the world quite alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they’re lucky, even after the first passion passes, they still have a kindness and patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get through the night with, to wake into the new day beside. If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don’t have children, they each become each other’s child.

They both still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.

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Pitch in to our Lemonade Stand!

June 16, 2011 — 2 Comments

My fiancee Katie and I met while both pursuing our desires to be instruments of peace in a world that seems to experience an awful lot of unrest, dysfunction and pain. It’s been amazing to have this in common and we’re thrilled that we get to get to do life together, as weavers of shalom sometimes fear they’ll have to go it alone. So when we get married on November 6 we want to celebrate God’s love and faithfulness in bringing us together, and to do so with the wonderful friends and family who have walked with us along the way. We want it to be a blast. We want it to be a party. But we also want it to reflect who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re headed.

In lieu of party favors, Katie and I are donating money to Lemonade International, a non-profit organization working to educate and empower young people in the largest urban slum in Central America. La Limonada is a settlement in a ravine in Guatemala City, the city where I was born and spent much of my childhood. Guatemala City sits on a plateau, with “fingers” of flat land jutting out between ravines with nearly vertical drop-offs in some places. I can remember standing on the edge of some of these ravines, or barrancos, and it was nerve-wracking. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in one, to try to raise a family in one.

With a population somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 people, La Limonada is considered a “Red Zone” — a dangerous place to visit, and an even more dangerous place to grow up. But the folks behind Lemonade International — and the Guatemalan men and women who inspired them to begin — believe that the hardships experienced by the children of La Limonada today aren’t inevitabilities for the future. Through their work supporting two schools, a community of faith, a construction workshop, a micro-enterprise program, and a safe home, they are reweaving shalom in a place where the fabric of life has by all accounts come undone.

In honor of our wedding, we’re inviting friends and family to consider making a donation to our Lemonade Stand, which will support the work being done in La Limonada. We’ve personally contributed $100 so far towards our goal of raising $1000 by our wedding day. Will you join us? Thank you!

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