summer of weddings

while I still haven’t gotten our official wedding pictures back, I thought I would take some time to post a few snapshots from the several weddings I attended this 2020.

In early June, I made the trip to Indiana to be a part of my pal, Hailey’s wedding.



My brother got married mid-June. Gracie, as usual, filled in as my wedding date.





At my own wedding, our preacher ran a little late, so I had to wait in the truck till he arrived!

joy

I've been thinking about joy lately.  What does it look like? How do you know someone is feeling it?  Is it a feeling or a state of being or both? Can it co-exist with sorrow, stress, and anxiety? Could someone have the joy of the Lord and not experience it every single moment?

Normally I ask all of these questions, and then I write about what I've learned. This time, I'm still thinking.

I was doing small yoga this morning (that means just a little bit), still wondering about joy, and the only sort of conclusion I've come to is the song my mom used to sing when I was a child.  "The joy of the Lord is my strength. The joy of the Lord is my strength."  Just that one line over and over.

Tanner and I get married in three days.  Maybe it's a bride-zilla thing to say, but the majority of our wedding is not going to look how I began to envision it would in December.  So many last minute decisions need to be made, and I care too much.  My former expectations need so badly to be thrown away, and it's hard work.  But we don't give up, we keep moving forward despite the tears.

I don't know all of the things joy looks like, but I think one of them is strength when things are hard.

when your right eye twitches

Did you know that even if you've convinced yourself that everything is fine, your body still has ways of telling you that everything is not fine?  Like, say for example, making your right eye twitch for weeks.  A week ago, my eye and emotional well-being were in a state.  Planning a wedding felt like too much, going to a missionary training center seemed impossible, work was too much to think about, and my mind was still in New York with my family.  I was crying a couple times a day, no problem.

Fast-forward to this week.  My bestest friend flew out to Wisconsin despite the corona apocalypse, and the first thing she said when she saw me was, "I'm taking you grocery shopping.  Not for me, for you." We got groceries, and with them, we hatched the hair-brained idea to make the flower arrangements for my wedding arch ourselves.  (Spoiler: they look SO much better than I was afraid they would!)  We've eaten a lot food, talked about the wedding weekend, organized, planned, and purchased.  She's had the chance to spend time with my fiance.  We've slept in.

My eye hasn't twitched in 36 hours.

And I think that's the reminder or lesson or moral.  Not many parts of life, particularly wedding planning, were designed to be handled by one person in isolation. While I know in my head that God designed people for community, to be balanced and supported and encouraged, I forget that I am not an exception even though I have enough stubbornness and pride for an army.  Asking for help is hard.  Asking for help figuring out what I need help with is...confusing.  The small seed of panic in my chest knows that not everything is figured out, but that is why I have a small army of God-fearing women around me, for planning wedding to marriage and beyond.

crash wedding diet

I’m not stressed out. 

You’re stressed out.

You’re projecting your stress on to me.

Side note: did you know that when I’m stressed (which I’m not) my body decides it isn’t really hungry and, in order to avoid nausea, I’m most content on Gina’s Y2K Liquid Diet.  But I’m not stressed out.

There are pieces of wedding planning that I thought would be difficult, like invitations and food and clothes. Turns out, no big deal. Do you want to know what has actually been the most harrowing on my nerves and overall well-being? RSVPs and the rehearsal dinner. No one warned me about those things! No one told me jack about the internal angst that would spring up from random emails telling me who is or isn’t coming to a party that I’m throwing in a place I’ve never been. And am I throwing this party or are my parents?

Which naturally flows into my colorful portfolio of current stress dreams. Like the one where Eminem is giving me poetry/rap lessons and then my dad shows up at my practice session, but I’m embarrassed and think he won’t enjoy poetry culture, so I ask him to go away. In the dream, his feelings are hurt so my feelings are hurt and I go to him to try to fix it and then my mom tells me his feelings were never hurt in the first place, but I miss the poetry show.  Or the dream where I can’t get into my mailbox, no matter how certain I am that I know the combination. Or the dream where it’s like the day of the wedding and Tanner shows up to marry me, but it isn’t him anymore, but everyone else thinks it is, and how does a girl deal with that?

I’m a little stressed out.

But the moments of quiet have been a blessing as well as a reminder. Sitting in the silence doesn’t feel like sitting with a stranger anymore. Lately, quiet feels like a warm cup of tea, over which God and I talk quietly and he reminds me of his big love for me, and my family, and the world. So I can stress, and you can stress if you want, but even stress that functions as a crash wedding diet kind of loses its luster when it gets compared to big love.

They Say It Lasts A Lifetime

I think we all have random memories.  Something from the dark recesses of long-term memory will occasionally bob to the surface of recollection and we think, "Seriously? Out of everything you could have saved, you picked that, Brain? Consider yourself fired." Exhibit A: is it really that important for me to remember the orthodontist's tuna breath at 3 a.m., a decade later?

But we hopefully also experience moments that we know, without a doubt, are memories that we'll carry as long as our brains are sufficiently functional. Exhibit B: yep, I definitely remember the time I dropped, not one, but two perfectly good tampons, applicator and all, into a dirty toilet.  Talk about five bucks in the toilet.  Maybe a better example is Exhibit C: thanks for holding onto that midnight trek through the jungle by moonlight, Brain.  While I didn't get pictures of the moonlit mountainscape (not for lack of trying, mind you), I know it is a memory that will linger.

In addition to that hike, I was privileged to attend a couple different weddings the week. One was a massive affair with 1,500 guests that the hosts fed for a grand total of three meals, if I'm not mistaken. The other had fewer guests, but still an impressive gathering.  Apparently, the way weddings work here is everyone gets together the night before the wedding for a blowout party that goes strong until the ceremony the next morning, only to revive the party afterward the the remainder of the day!

All that said, I think my take away memories were two traditional dances.  The first is one I think of as the bird dance.  Men play brass gansa drums while men and women dance around each other with their arms raised like bird wings.  A man will single out a woman and dance around only her.  After several minutes, he will offer his hand to her and she will either reject it or accept.  If she rejects, he can try again or try to get another girl. If she accepts, they walk out from the dancers together as a pair. If she doesn't, he can try again or go after a different girl.

The second dance is strictly (to my understanding) a wedding thing.  The bride and groom are the only dancers and the sort of slowly revolve in the middle of everyone.  The guests bring out money and pin it to the bride and groom's clothing as a kind of gift!  This dance can happen several times at one wedding and they'll end the dance covered in money every time.  Another similar dance happened at the second, but not the first. A scarf was draped across the bride and groom's arms, then guests placed folded bills or coins in either the bride or groom's mouth. If the coin started between the groom's lips, he would pass it mouth-to-mouth to the bride and she would drop it into the scarf.

That's all I have for today, except some pictures that will upload at their leisure!