Tim and Becky

Today a friend of mine got married. He married a very sweet woman. The wedding itself is a miracle for them both.  I cried at the wedding because I met him when he thought he would be alone forever after the end of his first marriage.  Unlike me though his wife left him, even after he tried multiple times to make his marriage work.  I personally do not know his new wife that well but I do believe she honestly tried to make her first marriage work as well.

Two people. Two failed marriages. Two sets of heartbreak.

One day, a glance. A thought. A chance.....

Today....two people, one body, one soul, a new life.

Another friend of mine Tammy Perlmutter spoke at the wedding and what she said is more profound than I could begin to inscribe myself.  I hope she doesn't mind but here is what she said.

 Tim and Becky love and worship and serve a God who rescues, redeems, and restores. He longs for broken hearts to be mended, for the lonely to be set in families, and for our losses to become our blessings.

All of us here can remember a time when disappointment, and possibly even despair, threatened to draw the breath from our lungs, and the life from our hearts. Tim and Becky have both experienced crushing losses of their own.

When our dreams take a turn we have not imagined or intended–when our dreams go careening off a cliff–we have a God who keeps us from going with them. When our plans and purposes shatter before our eyes, lying at our feet in a crumpled heap, we have a God who restores the years the locusts have eaten, who raises up age-old foundations, repairs broken walls, draws families together.
In one of her sonnets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, “God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.”

This short verse has never left me. It haunts me because I need to be reminded all the time that the dreams we cherish the most, the ones we hope for with desperate longing, are merely substitute shadows compared to the gifts God has reserved for us.

I need to remember that it is only when we accept our losses that we can we have hands and hearts that are ready to receive God’s gifts, good gifts he delights to give us and promises to us as his children. Tim, Becky, Lukas, Eben, and Noble have been given the gift of each other, and we, as family and friends, have the privilege to be here today and celebrate with them because “God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.”

Ryan O’Neal, the songwriter of Sleeping At Last wrote this in his song “Emphasis:”

Life is a gorgeous, broken gift.

Six billion pieces waiting to be fixed.

The sweetest thing I’ve ever heard

Is that I don’t have to have the answers,

Just a little light to call my own.

Though it pales in comparison

To the overarching shadows,

A speck of light can reignite the sun

And swallow darkness whole.

This is how we come to be fixed, to be healed, by joining together, gathering together, celebrating with joy, together.
Marriages founded on and rooted in the Holy Spirit are these simple specks of light in a bleak and shadowy world. This is exactly why we are here today. This wedding, this marriage, this mysterious communion of flesh and spirit, anchored in the heart of God himself, is that speck of light that can reignite the sun and swallow darkness whole.
And that is the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.