more wedding photos

i’m posting them as they trickle in…

all photos by jonathan stoner, who comes highly recommended for those of you who live in Grand Rapids.

some wedding photos

(all images by jonathan stoner)

vows

photo by patricia espedal

there are words said at weddings.  they’re more important than the after-party and certainly more beautiful than the flowers.

these were our words — our promises — to one another on our wedding day:

Joe: Do you Brooke take Tim, to be your husband, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, being faithful to him alone as your only love, giving him the first and best of your heart til death do you part?

Brooke: I do.

and…

I, Brooke, take you, Tim, to be my husband, secure in the knowledge that you will be my constant friend, my faithful partner in life, and my one true love.

On this day, I affirm to you in the presence of God and these witnesses my sacred promise to stay by your side as your faithful wife in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, in poverty and in riches, through the difficult and the easy.

I promise to love you without reservation, trust and honor you, comfort you in times of distress, call forth the best in you, laugh with you and cry with you, pursue unity with you in all things, grow with you in mind and spirit, always be open and honest with you, and cherish you for as long as we both live.

As I have given you my hand to hold, so I give you my life to keep. So help me God.

Entreat me not to leave you, or to return from following after you, for where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. And where you die, I will die and there I will be buried. May the Lord do with me and more if anything but death parts you from me.

and…

I give you this ring as a symbol of my vow to you. I humbly give you my hand and my heart as a sanctuary of warmth and peace, and pledge my faith and love to you. And with all that I am and all that I have, I honor you, in the Name of our Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

i pray, by the grace of God, to grow up into them. already, i can see that satan is hell bent against their fulfillment and my own flesh is often an uncooperative partner. but we have the mark of Grace on us, and that is no small thing.

on gift registries

oh, i have had such inner turmoil over gift registries!

my first response was: “this is silly and i won’t do it.” the reason for this was that i thought i had been on my own long enough to have already accrued plenty of necessities. i have enough to make-do and i don’t want to get new stuff just because i can. furthermore, our wedding is a potluck, which means our guests are already having to provide the food and surely they won’t also want to feel like they have to give us a present.

but then… well, then many of my married friends told me i might regret it. they said that probably people will WANT to give us gifts, and they might appreciate a little direction from us about what we could use or might like to have.  i started seeing how the act of giving a couple gifts at a wedding is symbolic just as much as it is practical. it’s a ritual and tradition in our culture that maybe i oughtn’t be so quick to discard. the ritual, at heart, is a community saying a young couple this:

“we believe that this thing called marriage, which you are stepping into together, is good for all of us. it matters to the well-being of the whole. and because we want to see you set up to succeed, and to have a home established into which you can practice hospitality, bear children, and enjoy one another, we will give you gifts. and you will be surrounded by tangible objects, each of which will bring to mind the person(s) who care about you and invested in your life together.”

when you put it that way, it seems silly not to register.

besides all that, i have to admit that once i started setting up the registries, i got really into it! i started seeing our future home come together in my mind’s eye as i selected butter dishes, towels, bedding, and baskets. and there is so much warmth in that, so much satisfaction. these objects that will surround us and suffer our daily uses, will belong to only us, our first set of shared possessions that create the backdrop on which our new marriage will unfold.

so i’ll receive the harvest of my community’s generosity and i’ll clothe my new family in it. and it will be very good.

(as for the old stuff, i’ll pass it on to some younger single friends who are establishing intermediary homes until they get engaged and are gifted by their community in turn).

save the date

Make a Smilebox slideshow