We feed on stories. Like children, hungry, malnourished, we starve for words.
But I wasn’t thinking any of that on Saturday, kneeled in a kitchen with a Grandma wrapping rosebud stems for a corsage and a bride fixing her veil while flowergirls swirl in sunlight.
They, these old family friends, had asked if I might come to shoot some candids. Just while the bride dressed and the family dashed about before the ceremony. To have a record.
Mama of the bride had shot our wedding nearly fifteen years ago… when today’s bride was but a seven year old with braids and the shyest blush. Artistic Mama of the bride would do the formal shots… I was just there for the stream of scurrying.
Oldest sister, turning 30 that day, fixes the sash of youngest sister, 12, and Father of the bride tries to hold the reins on five tuxedoed grandsons, all rambunctious hypergelasts under the age of five, and a daughter-in-law twists rosettes into a wiggling toddler’s ringlets. While a niece buckles the bride’s heels in a eddy of ruffles and satin.
I press the shutter.
Some, this simple point and shoot captures. Some, it misses.
Too many, I, solely and wholly, botch.
But I follow the train of white, the trail of petals.
I watch the father walk her down the aisle, the mother kiss her goodbye, the groom embrace her with adoring eyes.
I listen to the vows, forever words that graft souls, skin, lives, into one surging heart.
The rings find fingers, and they touch, and encircle, and this beginning has no earthly end.
I hear the nervous happiness of their youth, the awkward laughter before their announced kiss, and remember a long ago day, a blush like that.
And when the guests file out and the sanctuary sits nearly empty, I slip close to the altar for a frame of that unity candle flickering.
Two slender candles, extinguished. The two have become one. One light wavering together in a wide world, till death do they part. Someday, in a fiery heat of their own, they might forget. So the shutter closes. To have a record.
In alone moments, when guests chat in foyers, find name cards at tables, line up for the buffet, bride and groom press into each other. I catch glimpses of it, their aloneness in the whirl of the day, happy wonder at the miracle of this seeping of two into one.
And a hand touches the small of my back.
Then, a brushing close with quiet words, the warmth of him, an extension of me, husband close.
Now, in the milieu, his hand finds mine, thick fingers lacing through, unseen embrace of hand with gold band.
When the silver tinkles glass and the supping guests laugh and couple meld in another nuptial kiss, I always advert eyes. Turn into broad shoulder of him beside, embarrassed too. And he smiles, whispers into my hair, “They could ask us.” And I blush deeper, shake my head, embarrassed more.
Guests trickle out into the October dark. We find our vehicle, sit and wait and watch for my mama to wander out too, come for her ride home. Our minds are full of the day: the images, the words, the emotion.
The charged emotion.
In the shadows, his hand finds my cheek and he pulls me close, and though no one asks, we do. We do.
We’ve become the story.
The day’s love story, witnessed and lauded, has become ours. Invited guests, we were invited into their story, and we’ve come. Their story nourishes ours.
That’s when I think of it, there in the dark, how we feed on stories.
We hunger for story, a story that becomes ours. A story that becomes us.
We line walls with them, swell stores with stacks of them, create song lyrics and movie scripts with them. We crave to enter into story. The internet’s powered by story, and so we click, feasting.
Yet it’s our quiet everyday, too. Shalom curls in corner book nook, nested in words. Hope stretches across cushions and loses herself in pages of story. And in star-still of night, Kai tucks under covers and asks, “Did you think of another one? Tell me one when you were a little girl…”
They’re hungry for story. They feed on words.
So God came swaddled in story. He reveals Himself to us through the Grand Narrative. Because He knows we don’t hunger for a document with headings, bullet points, and appendix, a code of numbered laws. But a story to enter into, a story that will move us, transform us, a story with pain and sin, hopes and family, a story like ours. With a love like ours, and not like ours. With a love but like His. The real kind.
He comes to us in a storied romance. And invites us into that wild kind of love. For when we enter in and intimately become part of the story, we leave who we were and begin anew, changed.
Long after the bridal couple’s cocooned away into their one-life, and the man laying beside me sleeps, I lie awake staring at stars, thinking.
We become the story we feed on.
Marital love satisfies longings like no cheap imitation can. So the Real Story, the cosmic romance, fills us like no other story can.
What story will I feed on? What story will I become?
And in the dark, I slip closer to him.
Father, no words have anything on Your Word. Your Story is the one to fill on. We slip closer to You… become Your love story…
Enter into His Story:
Commit His Words to Heart
A Place For Everything
Heart Burn
Savor The Word
And from Evangelical Outpost: How to Change Your Mind
Photos: candids from a Saturday’s veiled love…
