This past weekend we had the joyous privilege of being part of the wedding of a dear friend and his new wife. A friend who, a year and a half ago Danny joined in a weekly let’s hit our knees and pray for a wife commitment. God brought her into his life 6 months later and this past weekend, just a year after first laying eyes on one another, they were wed….with our girls leading the way for the entrance.

Being flower girls might just have been the absolute highlight of my daughter’s first 4-6 years of existence. We eagerly planned and collected pieces of their sweet dresses and outfits.

We practiced their jobs, they solemnly performed their duties in the rehearsal and then Trinity made her fear confession…

“Mommy, I just thought of something dreadful.” (and yes, she used that exact word).

Thoughts of the bride backing out, or a tragic car accident flash through my mind…

“Oh, no! What did you think of?” I ask.

A long pause.

“What if Miss Amy decides she doesn’t want us to be her flower girls tomorrow?”

And to be honest, I’m very glad that this is the most dreadful thought my little six year old can conjure up, for this world that awaits her innocence can be dread worthy.

So for now, I will relish in their sweet awe of being in the presence of the “wedding girl” as Katy-Grace called her despite my constant explanations of the word “bride”.

And I will giggle along with those girls as they tease their brother, all bursting with his eight years of boy-ness, about the fact that not only would he have to sit through a “boring” wedding, but “then you’re gonna see them KISS!!” (Trinity must have told him that 20 times this weekend).

And I watch the mother son dance and I hold my boy close and whisper in his ear my tears spilling on his own cheek “honey, one day that’s going to be you and me dancing there, and I want to have earned your love and respect so much that you look forward to it, and I dread it. Like it should be. I’m sorry baby for the ways I’ve already failed to do that already.”

And I love weddings for the reminder of the beauty of man and wife woven into togetherness to bring forth life…life out of their deaths they die to who takes the garbage out and how the toilet paper gets put on the roll and all the other things one doesn’t think they are selfish about…until all that togetherness. Life out of death to individual priorities, that joint ones might be lived out. And life, little lives that come forth when we die to our desire to live for just one generation, our own.

And I love weddings, for the sake of hearing mothers of bride and groom cry over their babes being big enough to marry, for it is a blowhorn reminder to “savor.these.moments” these moments and days and weeks and months, for they will be gone all too soon.

May I win their hearts, win them to Jesus, long before another wins them. So that when those girls are all decked out in beauty array again, and boys turned men are dancing with their Mamma, I will freely hand them over…to one whose heart has been one over by the Winner of hearts.