Last Saturday I had the privilege of performing a wedding ceremony for a wonderful young couple. It was my first opportunity to ever be involved with an interracial marriage. The groom was black and the bride was white. As I stepped out into the wedding chapel at the beginning of the service, it was hard not to notice that everyone on the groom's side (with the exception of my wife) was black and everyone on the bride's side was white. The center aisle clearly divided not only the families but the races.
However, we did an unusual thing near the beginning of the ceremony. After standing and singing "Amazing Grace," I asked both sets of parents to stand. Then I said, "It is traditional for the father of the bride to give her away. However, in a real sense, both sets of parents share in the giving and receiving. It is the joining of two families." Then I asked the parents of the groom if they not only gave their son to be the bride’s husband, but also joyfully receive the bride as their daughter. The groom's parents replied, "We do." The same question was asked to the bride's parents.
Beth told me that the folks sitting near her really liked that. The parents and families gave this Christian couple their blessings.
It was a joyful union of not only a man and a woman but also two families...two families with different histories, different cultures, and different skin colors. I found it interesting that this wedding was on MLK weekend and thought to myself that this ceremony would probably not have been well received 40 years ago. We haven't solved all of our race relation problems but I thought it significant that this wedding was a joyous occasion between these two families on the annual weekend when we think about these things.
Sunday night, my 16-year-old daughter, Bailey, came home crying. I thought maybe she'd gotten a ticket or hit a dog or something. She had just received word that one of her lifelong classmates was killed in a car accident. She had lost another friend in a car wreck at the beginning of this school year. Two friends in one year. It's almost not fair. There was another boy in the car with Bailey's friend. A total of three students from her high school have died in car crashes. It is difficult for these teenagers to face. It is definitely a wake-up call to the dangers we face everyday in our cars and to the mortality of us all. God bless those families and the students at NAHS.
Yesterday I was reading C.S. Lewis. He wrote something that I thought was profound. The world exists not so that we can love God but so that God can love us. He went on to explain that our job is to soak up his love for us. We tend to get so busy loving God and working for God that we don't take time to let him love us. At least I do anyway. I need to stop my busyness for God long enough to enjoy his love for me. I confess that I don't do that near enough.
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