One of life’s blessings for me is the weddings we do. We have booked 18 weddings this 2014 season. I am personally facilitating 11 of them. We have guest pastors facilitating 5 of them and our other pastor facilitating 2 of them. In that mix, of the weddings I am doing/have done, 4 of them have been offsite. On top of that, I have already scheduled 4 weddings for 2015.
I work very hard at writing ceremonies that are personal and relevant to the couple’s life and experiences. When I have two weddings the same day or even a couple weeks in a row, I feel some stress and pressure because I don’t want to permit the busyness of a tighter schedule to diminish the quality of the ceremony.
The awesome thing about doing all these weddings is I am given the opportunity to meet lots of people. This year I have met families from Poland who came for their kids' wedding. I have met families that have moved to the US from China. I have been in places that I would never have been for the offsite weddings and have met the people who work there. I have had the opportunity to do weddings for my own family, which has been a special blessing in itself. I have done the ceremonies for two of our daughters and I am actually facilitating the wedding for one of our nieces next July, which I am very excited and honored to do. Last year, I facilitated the wedding of one of our nephews in Chicago and got to meet part of the bride’s family who came to see the wedding all the way from Oregon. We even had some conversation about me coming to Oregon to do a wedding. That was not very realistic but it was an interesting and exciting thought.
I am blessed to get to spend a good amount of time with the couples and get to know them pretty well. I often get pretty attached and they become family in a way. I did a wedding last year and now have a close friendship with that couple. In fact, I am overdo to have a coffee and a bagel with the groom.
I get some very nice thank you notes and pictures. I get to talk about love and marriage and how it is a gift from God. I get to share God’s view of marriage with hundreds of people I would have never had the chance to meet, let alone speak to. With a schedule like this year I have met and talked about the wonder and blessing of marriage to over a thousand people.
At times, I have the opportunity to talk to family members about struggles they are experiencing. They may share things in their lives that have been amazing and incredibly interesting. I have met Navy Seals and other soldiers from a variety of wars and heard a taste of their experiences. I have met people who have built businesses or who have lived all around the world. All in all, doing weddings has been an amazing experience for me.
I do weddings as a service. My team and I want to do all we can to make a couple’s special day the best it can be. The team wears name tags with a lanyard. The lanyards have “the Lord came to serve...” written on them.
Matthew 20:28 (ESV) “even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Our team takes that seriously. We greet, smile, and get people into place on time. We pin corsages and boutonnieres on. We do all we can to help remove any unneeded stress and pressure from the families. The people on our team truly have a heart for serving and love what they do.
My point in all this is that in serving we have been blessed over and over again. We work hard and give our best effort but somehow, we are the ones who end up being blessed. I began this blog by expressing some of the blessings I receive from my involvement with weddings. What I get back is far more that what I put out.
Serving others may appear to be a foolish thing to do in today’s world but it is so worth it. The blessing of doing such things fills one’s heart with treasures and wonderful moments. I believe that those who position themselves to be served rather than to serve are missing out on some of the wonderful things life has to offer.
Life becomes bigger, fuller, richer, and more wonderful through the moments and relationships that are created in service to others. Writer Dan Millman wrote “...service to others, there is no higher calling.” Since I read that many, many years ago, I try to live with it in mind. I believe it is absolutely true.
If life is dull or unfulfilled, go out and find a way to serve someone. Serve a neighbor, a family member or just keep a watchful eye for that person God places right in your path.
If you find you always cry at weddings, maybe join a wedding team! HA. We area always looking for the right people who love to help at weddings.
God bless you richly today!