Beach Weddings by Van

12/09/2019

From time to time, if not more often, in your marriage, it's good to be reminded what you promise to each other. Here is the meditation I gave at a recent wedding I performed:

God does not make a love that is wrong. The Apostle Paul wrote: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Love isn’t only looking at each other. It’s looking in the same direction, both of you looking in the same direction—that is to say, having a shared vision, shared dreams, shared goals and then moving forward to embrace all of this and bringing what you can to life.

That will require commitment and loyalty from both of you: strong commitment and unwavering loyalty—and that’s what you promise each other today. Dietrich Bonhoffer once said, “Up to now, it’s been your love that’s sustained your relationship. From this point on, it will be your marriage (your commitment to each other) that will sustain your love.”

This is an exciting journey you begin today. There will be romance and love, joy and ecstasy, blessings and delights, fun and frolic. Along the way, there will also be pain and distress, hardship and struggle, anxiety and concern, unease and un-peace.

Yet, through it all because of what you promise each other today, there will be that strong undercurrent of commitment and loyalty steadying your relationship and helping you to keep the main thing the main thing. Then, over the years and decades, you come to realize about the main thing and echo what Walt Whitman once said about his own marriage: “We were together. . . I forget the rest.”

So take your journey together. When appropriate, include your families. And remember God and His great love for the two of you. Live in His love and by His love. And to one another: be devoted and faithful. Be thoughtful and kind. Be loving and helpful. Looking in the same direction, make your marriage all it can be so that those around you can see and know all that love can be. AMEN!

On another note, here is a little seasonal pocket wisdom: When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed. [Maya Angelou]

01/11/2019

The marriage vows are vows of a lifetime and vows for a lifetime. The traditional wedding vows read: "I take you to be my wedded husband/wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, as long as we both shall live. Thereto, I pledge myself to you.”

There are couples who have asked me if they could alter these vows to change “as long as we both shall live” to “as long as our love shall last”—as if to say and likely believe that their love will not last their whole lives. In addition to this caveat in their vows, some of these couples also bring to the table of their marriage a pre-nuptial agreement, again apparently believing that their relationship is not for the duration.

These kinds of shifts in the understanding of marriage are couched in a belief that love is primarily centered in the feelings two partners have for one another. Though feelings of love are important in a loving relationship, the commitment to love undergirds it all. Jesus said to his disciples, “This I command you, to love one another.” Love is a commandment, an order. Yes, love is something you feel that is grounded in something you do. And that something you do is to commit yourself to one another and pledge your loyalty and devotion to one another for as long as you both shall live.

A vow is more than a pledge, more encompassing that keeping your word and much deeper than a promise. A vow is an oath that never sounds retreat, that stands strong against whatever might prevail against it, that stands steady and true for the long haul and that your partner in love can always count on. So, when you exchange vows, you create a bond and when God is in the mix, that makes it a three-fold bond. And, as recorded in the Book of Ecclesiastes, "a three-fold cord is not easily broken.” Your vows are for a lifetime. Be at peace. Live secure. Rejoice and be glad.

12/05/2018

November Wedding on the beach in Ft. Morgan

11/01/2018

Their wedding on the beach - October 2018

08/21/2018

There are those who believe that marriage is a prison of sorts that once married you are tied down and no longer footloose and fancy-free. Whether an assumption or a conclusion, it is false. If God is woven into the fabric of your life together, then marriage becomes an exhilaratingly free experience.
There are many freedoms that you enjoy. Here are a few. You are free to disregard and never be influenced by myths about marriage like the one mentioned above. You don’t have to live up to or live into what others might tell you about marriage or what conventional wisdom says about marriage if it conflicts with what God has to say about your relationship. You are free to open your lives to God who wants the very best for you, and if you seek His counsel and direction, and yearn to deepen your ties to Him, your lives will become the best they can be, living in the love and joy that God provides.
You are free to pattern your life together on the love that God pours out on you. You are free to give to one another, to support one another, to strengthen one another, to encourage one another, to pray for one another, to uphold one another and to care for one another. And this only nicks the tip of the iceberg of the many ways you are free in the bond of marital bliss. Marriage, under the auspices of God, doesn’t handcuff or constrict you in any way, shape or form. A fellow preacher sums it up like this: “If you want to know how to love your spouse, how to be unequivocally devoted to him or her, look to God. See how God loves and ask God to give you to the heart to love like that.

07/01/2018

One of the unique features of a happy marriage and enriching marriage rests in its electricity, in its power to light up and brighten up each other’s sense of excitement, pleasure, fun and reward. Of course, there’s being “turned on” and reveling in sexual electricity. But there are other ways to keep the electricity on over the years of your marriage. Here are a few:

-Hold hands a lot.
-Encourage in the midst of challenge.
-Comfort in times of distress.
-Seek to anticipate each other’s needs.
-Believe in each other. Pray for each other. Be sure to ask
God to surround your partner with abounding doses of love
and peace.
-Help when help is called for and particularly when it’s asked
for.
-Do little things, kind things to warm each other’s hearts and
deepen your marital bond.
-Take an interest in each other’s interests.
-When you can, work for your partner’s success.
-Bestow the occasional surprise gift.
-Fill your home with soft words for each other.
-Make the most of it when you’re together.

Employ these and discover other ways to keep the electricity on. Don’t let the power go out. Don’t live in the darkness of confusion, suspicion and anxiety. Instead, live in the light of love, joy and fulfillment.

06/01/2018

During a recent wedding ceremony, I gave the following meditation. I hope it proves helpful for you whether you're starting out in your marriage or you can hardly remember when you weren't married -

I cannot remember a time in my lifetime where the subject of lies, half-truths and mostly falsehoods has so dominated public discourse and personal conversation. It’s almost like the whole idea of promise and keeping your word has been so diluted that it’s been stripped of its meaning and value. For people of faith, though, promises inherently have a richness and vitality to them that lend meaning and fulfillment to one’s life. They carry a ring of expectation that what’s promised can be counted on to happen.

And so, this occasion, this wedding, marks the time when certain things are added to your relationship. Your feelings of love for one another and what you do to rouse and nurture your romance are now partnered with loyalty, devotion and commitment. You promise to love one another. You promise to be faithful to one another. You promise to bless and enrich each other’s lives. You promise to make it all work. And you not only promise these things to one another, you promise God that you’ll do them.

And why do you do this? Because you love one another and you want your love to last. And so, love is something that you feel for each other, while at the same time, love is something that you do for each other. This latter something is a commitment that you fulfill whether you feel like it or not. Hopefully, you do feel like it more times than not, but even when you don’t, it’s something you vow to do anyway.
Again, love is that attraction that warms your heart and stirs your soul as it also fills your relationship with a profound sense of a sturdy and steadfast faithfulness to each other. As such, it equips you to fulfill the vows you make to serve each other as Christ commands, to have and to hold each other, to care for and cherish each other, to provide for each other in good times and in bad, in happy times and in sad, in times when you’re well and in times when you’re not. - In the letter of I John you read, “Let us not only love with words or speech but with action and truth.” It is this understanding of love, this “doing” part of love that so many people are oblivious to, but not people of faith.

Those who believe in God know about the love that does because this is how God loves; and when God’s Spirit lives in you, this is how you love, too. You’ve invited God to your wedding and He is here. Invite Him into your marriage. He knows all about love and He’ll help you to deepen yours. He knows all about promises and He’ll help you to keep yours. He knows all about life and He’ll help to enrich yours. He’ll help you to see what you mean to each other and He’ll help your coming together today to grow into a bonding together tomorrow and through the years to come. The Book of Ecclesiastes says: “A three-fold cord (namely, the two of you and God) – A three-fold cord is not easily broken.” God is happy for the two of you. You will know happiness in Him. Invite Him into your life together and revel, revel, revel in the love, joy and peace He brings.

05/27/2018

Pictures of the wedding

04/16/2018

The word, fulfillment, is not an easy word to wrap your mind around. The dictionary definition is static and stale especially if you’ve felt fulfilled at one or more times in your life and know what a profoundly rich experience it is. Being fulfilled is, in the words of Frederick Buechner, coming fully alive. And this is one of the great fringe benefits when two lives come together and are bonded together in an intimate and happy marriage. Here are some of Buechner’s reflections:

“By all the laws both of logic and simple arithmetic, to give yourself away in love to another would seem to mean that you end up with less of yourself left that you had to begin with. But the miracle is that just the reverse is true, logic and arithmetic go hang. To give yourself away in love to somebody else—as two people give themselves away to each other at a wedding—is to become for the first time yourself fully. To live not just for yourself alone anymore but for another self to whom you swear to be true—pledge your troth to, your truth to—is in a new way to come fully alive.”

As a couple, in your life together, come fully alive and discover over and over again how richly fulfilling your married life can be.

04/05/2018

03/01/2018

If you're in a relationship and deeply committed to each other for the long haul, then take on William Shakespeare's words as your own:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

A little food for thought: The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from God. [Thomas Keating]

02/02/2018

Mississippi couple who wanted their wedding in Destin - August 2017