Author: al
Posted: 2007-11-07 17:58:29
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And The Old Folks Wished Them Well
There were certainly a lot of old folks at our wedding. I think they wished Nik well. I had no idea who the majority of them were. They had a good idea of who I was though. I was a 19 year old college drop out with no job. There were few places to go but up, so they didn't have to wish me well.
I'm not really a worrier though. I can't remember any trepidation about our future from this point in our lives. I don't know if I was too dumb to worry or if it was something else, but success seemed certain, if a bit distant. Here we were, at the front of a church filled quite to capacity on the bride's side with ninety percent of the occupants over seventy, and two teenage friends of Nik on the groom's side. I don't know if they were there out of pitty for me, or to get away from the old people smell across the aisle. Either way, it struck me as funny.
My side was empty because all of my relatives lived two thousand miles away in Mississippi, and I had only told them about the wedding two days ago. This ceremony might square me with God, but as Everett McGill put it, “The state of Mississippi is a little more hard-nosed.”
Pastor Kieth went over all of the pragmatic instructions dealing with the ritual. He would keep his thumb on the ring I wasn't supposed to grab. This would prevent me from grabbing the wrong one, or even both as nervous grooms are apt to do. I would really look silly if I did that. It was a fitting talk. The whole ceremony was a thing of pragmatism. Somehow this ceremony was to make our coming baby legitimate, and square Nik and me with society.
I don't know why we even had a church wedding. The ritual was completely unimportant to me at the time. It would be years before I would assign any actual significance to the event other than to appease those around us. Like everything else in my life, I could say that I stumbled ass backwards into the best outcome imaginable. Our wedding day is just one of the tiny linchpins in that trend.
There have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of instances that I could proclaim as miracles in my life. Some percentage of them might actually be so, but I don't like to attribute them to God because you never can really know. To this day, I can't say if I am lucky or blessed with Nik. If it is just luck then it's staggering luck. There are two things that I have heard Pastor Keith say that I think are wrong. The first is when he told Nik and me that we were not made for each other, and that there were many other people out there that we were compatible with.
That might be true for most people. It might even be true for everyone except me. Whatever the case, I know that he was wrong when he uttered the words to us. I am a little cruel to other girls and women. They all share an undefinable quality that I just do not like. Perhaps their only common link is that they are not Nik. At any rate, she is unique among all women. There is only her, and those not like her. With odds of one in a couple billion, I think that is as good a case for divine intervention as any, but it's still not a certainty.
Looking back on it all is an amazing and scary thing. It really brings home how God uses our imperfections. Some people say that the Fall was by design; that salvation through Christ is so much more valuable than pre-fall innocence. I am not sure if the fall was by design, but salvation is most assuredly more amazing than innocence. For two thousand years we've been talking about this. The Eternal takes our sins and produces good from them. It is staggering really.
It's hard sometimes, to be penitent for things that you wouldn't change. When God takes something bad and brings good out of it, how are we really supposed to feel? Am I wrong for not feeling guilty? Good thing we cannot go back, or we would have to argue the sinfulness of such a thought. I think that is what Lewis meant in The Great Divorce when he said that Heaven is retroactive. All of our sufferings and sins are what eventually guided us to that destination, and are made sweet by it. What a beautiful world.
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