Yesterday I got all cleaned up, donned a suit, slipped on a tie, and smiled for about thirty cameras. For my wife. With my wife. Did I mention she was in her wedding dress?
Someone she works with’s best friend is in a wedding photography course at a local tech college and needed a married couple to model for them last night. Even the thought of doing it grew me a goiter. I dress up for weddings and funerals. To marry and bury. That’s it. And we had to cancel Life Group and swimming lessons for our kids to do it. But we promised, and we had to follow through. I grumbled, and so did my stomach. My attitude scraped the bottom of the barrel, let me tell ya.
And then came God’s question, posed ever-so gracefully right between my eyes: “Do you trust me?”
Sigh. Yes, Lord, I trust you. I don’t want to, right now, but yes. I trust you. So off we go. Did I mention I was also flirting with a migraine? That my white shirt had pit stains from a funeral I did last week? That her wedding dress has been stuffed in a box and has chocolate stains and had to be yanked and pinned back like 400 inches because she’s lost so much weight and she was still falling out of it and that my one and only tie was wrinkled? Yup. Be still, my beating heart!
But five minutes in, we realized that the evening was a great opportunity to hold hands, snuggle, dream into each other’s eyes, and kiss. Lots of kissing. Yummy.
And on several occasions, we were asked how long we’d been married. “Fifteen years,” I said at one point, “And still newlyweds.” Of course, someone ventured the next question: “What do you do?”
“I’m a pastor.”
Oh.
No more questions, but the seed’s already been planted. They now know that a fun couple married 15 years who are still very much in love are pastors. Dang. Just blew their religious stuffed-shirt image to smithereens. Mission accomplished.
Yeah, we’ll get a CD with all the pics on it. And we did the friend’s friend a favor. But mainly, we got to kiss for a night and show a small slice of the world what a Christian marriage can look like. Yes, Lord, I trust you.