We Love Because He First Loved Us

I'm so excited for your wedding!  This seems to be a sentence I hear a lot these days. I'm never really sure how to respond to this statement. I mean obviously I'm excited too, but some of these people seem more excited than I am. I mean don't get me wrong I am incredibly excited. I have given some thought to this difference in excitement, you see most people are excited about the dresses, the colors, the food, and the party atmosphere a wedding brings. Here's the deal though, I don't like dresses, colors are colors, food is expensive, and I don't party. I think I see the difference in excitement.  There is honestly a part of me that wants to go to the courthouse and not deal with all of the hoopla wrapped around this one day. There is a part of me that dreads the inevitable dress shopping and the idea of so many pictures of me being taken in said dress...weddings can be so incredibly stressful. It is such a huge day that marks your life and makes a statement about your chosen relationship for life.

But it isn't the wedding I am looking forward to, it is everything that is happening after. I'm excited about marriage. I'm excited about spending my life serving Adam, serving with Adam, learning everything about him, riding the tides of life with him, and together becoming the couple in ministry that God has planned for us. I'm excited to see where God takes this relationship. It has been incredible to be a part of this journey. There are so many moments I find myself overwhelmed by the way God has answered my prayers in an old friendship that has become so much more. I often look over at Adam and am humbled to think that he has chosen me and the only thing I can do is say a prayer of thanks for the incredible man God has brought into my life for me to love. So when I think about marriage and all that comes with it I am overwhelmed with excitement.

You might be thinking, why don't you just get married then, just skip the wedding. There is another side to weddings I haven't mentioned yet, and this is the part I am excited for, the part that is worth all of the planning, and even worth putting on a dress. It is the part where we get to unite our lives in a worship setting. We get to to share what God has done in our lives with our closest friends and family. God created us to be a people of community. We are not meant to go through life alone. Adam and I did not come to this part of our lives alone. We will not go through any other part of our life by ourselves. We are meant to worship in community, serve in community, and overall live lives of community....so why would we start this new phase of our lives without the community we have love and cherish? I cant even imagine going that route. I am also a person that loves tradition, so bring on the dresses, the colors have been selected, we will have cake and eat it too, as for the party....we will do it in full camp and church style!

So as I sit here staring at the piece of jewelry that started all of this excitement I can't help but feel incredibly blessed and excited about the love story that is being written in the lives of two people part of a Christian community in a world created by love itself. "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." - 1 John 4:9-12

If I run off to the courthouse then I am preventing my community from an opportunity to experience love which is to experience God himself. And that goes against everything I believe in and stand for. So bring on the wedding and all it entails, oh and bring on the excitement and bring on the sharing of love!