Since I am going to be married in a few short weeks, I thought I’d share with you a piece I wrote almost exactly a year ago, when my friend Mike was getting married. Hope you like it.
Weddings
Every time a couple gets married, two single people die.
Leslie Knope-Parks and Recreation
People in Salt Lake will use the word “show” to describe multiple events, usually only two or three of which are actual “shows.” Movies, concerts, plays, poetry slams, etc., are bundled up in the title of “show” as an all-encompassing “event.”
So today, in Utah fashion, I guess you could say we as a community are going to a show.
Today is the day of our first wedding as a community. My roommate Mike is marrying his girlfriend Dani after nearly four years of dating. Josh is ordaining the wedding and I am a groomsmen along with a few others from our church. It’s all very exciting.
For the bachelor party we shot guns in the desert just beyond the Salt Flats. Afterwards we had dinner at Nate Stoltenows’s house and proceeded to go drinking at The Republican and My Ex-Wives Place (actual name of bar, which I believe is named after the owner received the bar in a divorce settlement.) Though Mike and Dani didn’t necessarily meet and grow up through our church, they have been a huge part of it from the beginning and so it is a blessing to celebrate their oneness, their physical manifestation of the union of Christ and his bride.
This wedding marks the first of many for the summer. I’ve already been to one in April, next week Dan and Laura are getting married in Portland, Tim and Steph are getting married in New York early September and I have two other friends who are getting married in other parts of the country. Oh! To be in your twenties!
Weddings when you’re single are the happiestloneliest of times. You are very happy, excited, but sometimes, not all the time, you feel a slight twinge of loneliness because you are not married, maybe not even close. I think that’s why the movie Bridesmaids did so well this year. I think many people have a hard time watching other people join their lives together when they find themselves approaching their late twenties, early thirties, and still have no one.
The wedding was held at The Point, a ballroom on the sixth floor of the Huntsman Cancer Institute, which is, remarkably, shaped like a point. The room’s walls are made of glass and offer a near three hundred and sixty degree view of the entire Salt Lake Valley. The whole room funnels into a triangle shooting straight between the Wasatch mountain range on your right and the Great Salt Lake to the left. At first, we all thought it was weird to have a wedding on the top floor of a cancer center. It felt disrespectful, irreverent. But maybe dark places, places of death, can also hold places of light and life. Maybe the people who built the Huntsman Cancer institute knew this. Or maybe they just wanted to make money. Either way, the view was incredible. As I stood with a glass of wine watching the sun set upon the Great Salt Lake to the west and bits of pink splash the white tops of the mountains to the east, I realized I had never been happier to live in this city. Perhaps it was the booze talking, but it felt like a big deal considering I spent the two weeks before repenting for my lack of love for the city. But tonight, tonight I love this city. Call me a sucker for emotion, for sensuality, call me drunk if you will, but I love this city.
The wedding was great. There was good food, good friends, meaningful speeches, and a deep sense of respect and thanks to the God who gives us these things.
Towards the end of the night, about ten of us left to decorate Mike and Dani’s car in the garage below. Josh and I went to observe. After ten minutes the car had more penises and crude words written on it than anything I’ve seen in public. Josh and I washed our hands, hoped the grandparents wouldn’t be coming outside.
I hang out with a lot of people who disagree with the very concept of marriage. They have no desire to get married. They’ve seen their parents’ marriages fall apart and sometimes even their friends and feel that marriage no longer works. Some think of it is a failing traditional moray of archaic family structure. Some think of marriage as a social construct, unnatural to the natural world. They think we should be free to love anyone and everyone, have multiple consenting partners and live in the same primitivesque way as animals. But I still I think all of us want intimacy. I think we even desire jealousy in relationships.
The next afternoon Kyle talked about jealousy at church. We are still in Exodus as a community and are walking through what it means for a new community to come face to face with this God who has rescued them out of Egypt. We have seen the attributes of God as provider through manna and water in the rock; we have seen God as a God of abundance, rather than scarcity. And today we see God as entering into a covenant with this new Israelite community through the Ten Commandments. I think it’s important to understand God as a God who does not promise to take care of the Israelites if they follow his commands. He has already taken care of them. God does not give them rules and say, “If you hold up your end of the bargain, I’ll hold up mine.” God is already, has already, held up his side of the bargain no matter what. It is through these “rules” that God helps us understand his character and attributes, our identity as a set apart people and our relationship to each other. And ultimately, these rules shows us how utterly incapable we are of keeping them. It brings us close to our need.
Sometimes reading through the Old Testament can feel as if God forgot to take his medication. In the Old Testament we see an angry, jealous God reminiscent of Al Pacino on PCP. This is the God who smites Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone, okays genocide, and wipes out entire nations of people. He is wrathful, He is powerful, He is Zeus with lightning bolts. A God who smites those who get to close to the ark, who makes people wander around in deserts for forty years. Who allows Israel to be taken captive by neighboring empires on multiple occasions. They deserved it. A God wipes out humanity with a single flood and decimates all who get in his way.
In the New Testament we meet a God who is loving and gracious, forgiving and compassionate. This God loves sinners and hangs out with homeless people. He accepts you for who you are. Both of these Gods are one and the same. The Just and the Loving. The Jealous and the Gracious. It is hard to make sense of. Some people preach a gospel of the righteous, indignant God. These are the street corner solicitors, the proud pissed off preachers. They push God into your jugular because God is angry with you and you are going to hell. God is a God of fear, awe and respect. He must be appeased. You are sinful and if you do not repent you will go to hell.
Others preach a gospel of love and grace. They hang out with the disenfranchised doubters, the scandalous sinners and speak that God is love. God is a friend and Jesus a lover of the broken. They will tell you that you can do nothing to earn God’s love for you, it is a gift to accept, a drink to indulge.
And both are, to some extent, accurate views of God. God is righteous and loving. It is a hard paradox to accept for me. It seems contradictory that God would simultaneously love the whole world and condemn it for its sin. That God would call us his enemies and then die on the cross for us and call us friends. The New Testament seems to contradict the Old Testament and vice versa. Both show different, but equally true sides of God.
In the New Testament you meet this guy Jesus who says that you should love your neighbors, he even says that you should love your enemies. Not just love them, but go out of your way to help them. Walk two miles rather than one. To repay their evil with good. He even says that if someone tries to take something from you, give them more. If someone hits you, let them do it again. If someone asks for your coat, give them your shoes too. But one day Jesus makes a whip and starts to drive people out of the temple. I’m not sure if he hit anyone, but I’m pretty sure this is not considered pacifism. Then there is the whole thing on forgiveness. He says you are supposed to forgive. No holds barred, no exceptions, just forgiveness. No matter what. The idea of forgiveness contradicts the idea of justice. You don’t get what you deserve, there is mercy and compassion. What is unfolding between the Old and New Testaments? It seems like God was a little angry, had a few, and then got real friendly with us. When did God transform from a football coach to my grandma?
My old roommate’s stepdad was an alcoholic. The guy was a jerk, but when he drank, he would just get real friendly and start handing out money. It seems that God is the same sometimes. One minute he’s drinking and the next he is handing out money.
If there is one thing the Bible is not short on its paradoxes. One story says one thing and then another says something that appears to be entirely different. Jesus says in one passage that those who live by the sword will die by the sword, implying that we should put down our weapons and stop fighting. You start to get a little teary eyed and hopeful as Jesus speaks about peace and love and how there is another way to live. Then later He says that He did not come to bring peace, but a sword. Wait, I thought Jesus wasn’t into swords? Didn’t He tell a guy named Peter to put his down?
But you can’t deny that God is a Jealous God. To some people that doesn’t sound right, but we all know that if Mike came back from his honeymoon early with another girl we wouldn’t all say, “Well, that’s Mike!” And when Dani came back, fuming, furious, eyes of fire sort of angry, we would probably support her in her wrath.[1] She would be justified in her anger, in her jealousy.
We all want to be desired. We all want a to enter into a relationship with another person who is solely committed to us. Which is why marriage is a beautiful thing.
I usually try not to think about marriage at weddings, because then I’ll get to thinking about how I’m not married and probably never will be and will remain single, frazzled, stuck eating ice cream on a yellow couch like Liz Lemon. [2]I always feel horribly selfish when I start thinking about myself at weddings. Here I am, to celebrate someone else’s life, and all I can think about is how none of the bridesmaids are single. Really? None of you are single!
However, living with a family helps block up some of my romanticism. Jeremy and Emily will be arguing in the next room about something, while I try and watch Harry Potter with the kids, but I can’t watch the damn thing because Avianna and Alidia are climbing on me as if I am a fake tree in the monkey cage at the zoo.
Then Alidia farts on me. I hope it’s dry.
Marriage is hard. Having a family is hard. I’m glad lots of people told me this so that I am no longer disillusioned.
Right now I am starting to feel nostalgic about high school relationships. It seemed simpler. You liked someone, they liked you. There was no conversation about what your five year plan was, your past relationship baggage, or where this relationship was going. Or no, scratch that, you knew where this relationship was going; it was going to last forever! That’s where it was freaking going.
When I was a junior I dated a girl named Becca. She lived in Evergreen. She had long curly hair and made purses out of Capri sun packs. We would make out all day in parks, like one of those disgusting teenage couples you probably snicker at now. When she left at the end of the year to move to Hawaii with her family, I thought I might die. I didn’t, luckily, but I remember the next time I saw her and how different it felt. We both went to college, had life happen to us. A year and half later we caught up, and I realized that things would never be like they once were, both of us flying through the summer night air as if we were invincible. We were now adults.
I dated another girl named Mackenzie. She lived in Littleton. We used to work at Christian summer camp together. One night we were sitting on her couch when she threw a pillow at me. I knew what this meant. Eventually we kissed. Next week we hung out again. We kissed this week also. Then I was idiot and didn’t call her for a while, and before I knew it, she was dating some other guy. But those were the best two nights I ever spent with a girl. We would take late-night trips to the park by her house. Go down the slides. Push each other on the swings.
However, I’m glad to be where I’m at, well, most days. And since taking a break from dating, I am genuinely excited about the next girl I will intentionally date. It could be a month. It could be five years. But when it happens, it will be good. It will not be forced. It (hopefully) will not start out with me feeling lonely and desiring a warm body to hold.
As we all left the wedding that night, you could feel the summer air start to roll in off the desert. It reminded me of the first night of summer, the first night of the year when you can stand outside in a t-shirt and feel comfortable, warm even. I am glad that God gave us seasons. And I am glad that Salt Lake has them. I guess I’m trying to appreciate the one I’m in.
