I do!

 The look on the priest’s face as he begins to read the 3-page long wedding banns / announcements is priceless! It says it all: the wedding season is upon us!

Watching young couples approach their big day with all the bustle and excitement really brings back memories of our 4-month long preparation for our own wedding day which happened 24 years ago!

 

Looking back now, so much of what we invested so much time, energy and resources into had little or no relevance soon after the wedding. After all, a wedding is just for a day, a marriage for a lifetime! I remember the day after the wedding, wondering what had to be done with the expensive wedding dress and painstakingly handcrafted flowers.

Over the years, I’ve had the chance to step back and take an objective look at our wedding planning decisions and if I happen to step into a time machine that would take me back to 1998, these are the things I would change:

 

1.   Have my husband (who was the only one of us working then) pay for our wedding, rather than have our parents pay for it. So much stress in wedding planning comes from the balancing act the couple has to do between the expectations, traditions and demands of both sets of parents and families. If we had paid for our own wedding with our meagre savings, we would have been limited to having a small wedding with only immediate family members and close friends rather than having to smile at and guess who every aunty and uncle were at our wedding. By paying for our own wedding, we would have had much more say in how we wanted to celebrate both the Holy Mass and the reception, as guess what – it is we, the husband and wife- who are the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony. If our parents wanted to throw their own post-wedding parties, we could have attended those as guests and not be obliged to play along with every expectation. We expend so much energy trying to keep up with impossible demands of how everyone thinks everything should be when we should be focusing on the actual wedding- our union in and through God.

 

2.   To make every decision, we would ask ourselves- what is the possible eternal implication of this decision? I really doubt the colour of the flowers or the location of the caterer’s table would have any relevance to anyone’s salvation. But maybe there were somethings we could do that would have had an eternal impact. We would focus our energy on those.

 

3.   On the morning of the wedding, we would have an hour of silent adoration before the Lord followed by an hour of community praise, worship and prayer for whoever was interested in blessing us before we entered the Church to minister the Sacrament to each other in the evening. Just imagine us all entering the Church in the evening with our minds, emotions and bodies soaked in the presence of the Lord.

 

4.   We would ask our priest friends to make themselves available to administer the Sacrament of Reconciliation for the wedding guests and anyone else who wanted to make a good confession. Just imagine us all entering the Church in the evening with clean hearts.

 

5.   We would eat a heavy breakfast, a light and early lunch and approach the Holy Eucharist with many hours of fasting, hungry for more of God in His life-giving body and blood.

 

6.   We would spend less than an hour in total on makeup, dressing up and posing for photographs. Never once in 24 years of my marriage, has the handsomeness of my groom or the lack of my worldly beauty affected our actual relationship and marital unity.

 

7.   Instead of leaving the content of the jokes to the compere and the content of the music to the DJ, we would give clear and detailed instructions to both to avoid-like-the-plague any vulgar content. Looking back, it would have been better not to have a compere and DJ at all than to have to cringe a dozen times during our reception for how we gave them a public platform to air the corruption of their hearts.

 

8.   We would have clarified that we did not want money or flowers or boxed gifts and instead asked everyone we knew to glorify God by paying for themselves and others to go on a live-in retreat before our wedding.

 

9.   We would create our own God-honouring traditions: wash each other’s feet in public as Jesus washed His disciples’ feet, pray over the single men and women present for them to hear and answer God’s call over their lives, gift every married couple at our wedding with a marriage Bible devotional.

 

10.              And before we consummated our marriage, we would have prayed and invited the Holy Spirit to teach us to love each other as only He could: freely, faithfully, totally and fruitfully.

 

Do you wish you had done some things differently at your wedding like I do?

List them down in the comments section. They just might have an eternal impact on someone’s soul.