His Vows

I am writing these vows at the end of a really long and stressful week, after we have completed list after list of wedding tasks only to find more lists. What helps me most to get through all this craziness is to imagine myself saying these words to you on the best day of our lives, when all the anxiety takes a back seat to your radiant smile and your gleaming eyes. This is the moment that sometimes seemed like it would never come.


I promise to love you forever. I can't promise that it will always be easy or pretty, but I promise that it will be true. I promise to always try to be the husband you deserve, even when we are tired, stressed, angry, or just confused. I promise to hold you when you feel alone, fatigued, and overwhelmed. I promise to provide for you, that is to provide silence when you are still waking up, provide corny jokes when you really don't need them, and provide poorly executed massages when you ask for them. I promise to cherish your laughter and tears even when they come all at once. I promise to respect you even if I think you are wrong, unfair, or just plain crazy. I promise to respect you as my equal in Christ. I promise to trust you in all circumstances, especially when my instinct says I should run and hide. I promise to remember all these promises even after eleven o'clock at night when I have lost the ability to think rationally.


You are more than I dreamed of, and the longer I love you, the more I find to love. You are God's gift to a truly undeserving man, and with His help, I promise to love and honor you with all my heart and soul for the rest of our lives.

How to Boil Water

STEP ONE
Receive an awesome cookbook from your aunt.

STEP TWO
Choose recipes--Tuscan chicken stew, Eggplant parmesan, chocolate chip cookies

STEP THREE
Grocery shop

STEP FOUR
Cook... for a really freaking long time. (lesson learned... if the recipe says one hour, it will take at least 2)
Place what you think is a dutch oven on the stove over medium heat. Apparently though it's a casserole dish and will spontaneously combust in about 2 minutes... exploding and shattering all over the kitchen.
Skin the chicken, even though the recipe was really clear you should have bought skinless in the first place.
Cut up the eggplant. Realize you don't know what the inside of an eggplant it supposed to look like and yours might be bad. Look on wikipedia for a picture. Decide you're ok.
Pour in Italian seasoning on the "pour" side not the "sprinkle" side. Try to scrape as much out of the dish as possible, although what remains is roughly 4x what the recipe calls for.

STEP FIVE
Make a huge mess. Use a different dish for everything. Curse the day you rented an apartment without a dishwasher.

STEP SIX
Enjoy a lovely meal and the wine you didn't use in the recipe.

Vows (the Mrs.)

I respect you as my equal in Christ and I promise to love first God and then you.

You have set me free to be who I am. You love me with a phenomenal and unconditional love that is the most perfect picture of Christ’s love for which I could ask. You have far surpassed my expectations of a partner and you have opened up my heart in such beautiful ways. I love the light in your spirit, your kind heart, and your constant seeking of truth.

I pledge to make Christ the center of our life and to pursue His love and justice together with you. I will honor your dreams, nurture your gifts, and embrace your deepest parts. I will not abandon my individual calling in favor of yours, nor will I allow you to sacrifice your individual calling in favor of mine. Rather, I will live our life together as we are one, pursue our collective callings, and seek interdependence with you. I will always try to fully communicate my feelings, fears, desires, and hopes.

Falling in love with Christ prepared me to fall in love with you, and I know that His love will sustain us, guide us, and impassion us forever.

Wedding Ceremony Recap (by the Mrs.)

I am certainly not going to be able to do this justice! It was the most wonderful day. I know probably all couples say that but it was really fantastic. So intimate and celebratory and joyous and peaceful.

We chose not to see each other before the ceremony so the anticipation was pretty gigantic. I forgot that the bride doesn't get to participate in anything at the beginning, which was kind of a bummer, b/c we planned such cool stuff. Teitur and Snow Patrol on a string quartet, for one. But I treasure the time I had with my dad while we were waiting. The moment I saw my beloved it all felt real, like it was for us and about us and we were entering into something so sacred. He smiled at me so big when he saw me walk down the aisle and I couldn't help but cry. My mom stood up with my dad and I at the front and they gave their blessing, and I took his hand and held on for dear life. I lost it when our good friend read Walt Whitman as an invocational prayer.

Then it came to the vows. Our pastor reworked the traditional vows so they sound a little cooler, and speak of serving each other as Christ loves the Church, which is exactly how we both want to live. Then we read our personal vows to each other from a scroll hand calligraphied by my former roommmate. His were eloquent and sometimes humorous and again, made me cry. I said all the things I wanted to say and loved having everyone hear our vows, it crystallized them somehow.

We got to take communion together, which was very cool. It's meant a lot to us to take communion each week for the last 2 years, and our good friend served us, to remind us of our new covenant.

One of my favorite parts of the ceremony was the prayer/dance. Ok not a prayer dance like a rain dance. All of our attendants came on stage to circle around us and pray, while members of my former dance company danced a beautiful interpretation of the song "Divine Invitation" by Something Like Silas. It was a way to interpret the moment with music, words, movement, and prayer. Amazing.

We walked out to "We Are One Tonight" by Switchfoot, performed on strings, off through the crowd and into the bookstore (fitting, right?). We faced the congregation the whole time so we got to absorb the community of friends and family and support around us. And the pastor introduced us correctly!

Funny moments:

When it was time for me to say "I Do" for the traditional vows, I hadn't been paying attention because I was lost in Eric's eyes and my elation. I hesitated because I wasn't sure it was my turn!

When reciting Revelation 21, the reader said a "bridge" beautifully dressed for her husband instead of "bride." The Mr. kept calling me his "beautiful bridge".

On the way up to serve communion, our friend tripped up the stairs on the stage. My father-in-law thanked him for doing so, because that meant the two of us wouldn't trip (and we didn't).

Several of my relatives thought it was scandalous that I went barefoot for the ceremony. No comment on the dancing, lack of traditional music, the lack of unity in my attendants' dresses, or the fact that we both hyphenated our last name. Just my lack of shoes, go figure.

How to Get a Marriage License

I'm still not sure how I feel about all the legalities of marriage. I believe marriage is a spiritual covenant so it just feels kind of weird to have to sign papers and pay taxes and all that. However, I suppose there is something cool about being legally bound to each other.

We first attempted to get a marriage license a few weeks ago, by going to the Justice of the Peace. That was the wrong place to go but I didn't know that. We stood in line with juvenile delinquents and people paying traffic tickets. When we got to the window we announced we were getting married with a silly grin. She told us to go to the county clerk, the office of whom was of course closed that day.

So we tried again last week. We found the right office and it was open, no big deal. (Although there was a guy distributing literature that said "lower gas prices to Bush's IQ", which was very romantic.) The clerk said he knew my FH was not from Texas because he had such an accent. He has not lived outside of this state for about 25 years. The lack of an accent is not an accent, but East Texans have trouble with that concept sometimes.

Any way, everything went along fine until time to inscribe our name on the official document. Without even asking, the clerk put "Mr. and Mrs. husband's first husband's last". Ugh. I asked him why I didn't get a name. Then we explained that our name would be hyphenated. Thankfully we caught him before the process was finished. But c'mon, it's the freaking 21st century. Doesn't he think that perhaps at least someone wants to do things a little differently? Sigh.

Later that day we went to pick up a Bible that we had engraved. As a wedding gift our pre-marital counselor gave us a family Bible. The store clerk couldn't find it because he didn't understand our name. When he finally located it, he said "oh, right, that combined name one".

Just a small taste of life with a hyphenated name, I'm sure. It's going to be worth the trouble.

How to Party without Degrading Yourself and the Opposite Sex

So bachelor parties are known as celebrations of all the things that are apparently most sacred to single men, namely booze and naked women. It will come as know surprise that of course I think that is completely ridiculous, and I am baffled as to why men would want to be thought of as sexist drunk idiots. Since alcoholism and objectifying women has not been a part of my bachelorhood, I certainly didn't want to celebrate them at my bachelor party. Fortunately for me, my groomsmen were all more than happy to oblige. (I think many men would prefer not to participate in such behavior and would simply say so if they did not feel it would threaten their standing in our patriarchal culture.)

Instead of the typical bachelor party debauchery, we elected to spend the day on Lake Conroe. My brother borrowed his roommate's boat, and we tubed on the lake. One of my groomsmen attempted wakeboarding, but we had to call it quits shortly after because of a storm that was approaching. Said storm almost sunk our boat on the way in, mostly because the boat was a Sea-Doo, one of those vehicles that is more like a giant wave runner than a normal boat. Needless to say, it does not have the durability of a typical boat. Water started coming in over the side. It was up to the knees of the guys in the back. The cooler was even floating. Getting back to the landing area should have taken 5-10 minutes. It ended up taking us somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour. I can't say for sure because I lost track of time when we had to start bailing water out of the boat.

Despite almost sinking the boat, we had a really good time. Afterwards we went out to dinner, and then we called it a night. I woke up the next morning hang-over-free, having had a full night's sleep (which is completely sacred to me). I did have a bit of a sunburn though. Needless to say, it is totally possible for a group of guys to have a good time without degrading themselves or the opposite sex, and they can retain most of their brain cells at the same time. Who knew?

How to Have a Bachelorette and Bachelor Party

FH can tell you all about his bachelor party (you just need to ask him about nearly sinking a boat).

Tonight I had my bachelorette party for the girls in the wedding and girls in my small group. My sister, who is the greatest, planned everything and spent a LOT of time preparing. There was a 3 course meal, a gourmet cake (that she made), a murder mystery game, gift opening, and a rosary-making-blessing (all the guests put a bead on a string and passed it around the room, saying a blessing for us as they did). It was all pretty fantastic.

I can't believe it's only 2 weeks away! It may well be the longest 2 weeks of our lives...