T - 17 Days and Counting

In 17 days my oldest son is getting married. Awesome, great, it is going to be a terrific day. They will make a great couple. Jessa is his heart match and they are going to have wonderful life. The next 17 days though are going to be a wild ride. I am just the father of the groom, and in the wedding food chain I come just below the book attendant. I cannot imagine going through this with a daughter. (Yahweh in his wisdom knew I could not be a father of daughters - he gave me three sons. Tom, you have three daughters, bless you.) I have been fairly disconnected with the wedding preparations, fairly intentionally. But having watched and listened from the sidelines I have observed a few things. (Now I must make a confessional, having performed over 250 weddings - I lost count a long time ago -they are not my favorite things. Not even in my top ten. Yes I am jaded.)

• Weddings take on a life of their own. Oh you can plan for a simple one but that dies a quick death and the train takes off. Details multiply like guppies.
• Reasonable sane people do unreasonable insane things. Seriously who cares about the color of ink? Pockets or no pocket on shirt? Okay.
• The work to results ratio is way out of balance. You plan for a wedding for months if not a year. It consumes your thinking, it devours your resources, it last may be - what - 45 minutes? Yeah, yeah, yeah you have the reception and the all the stuff before hand. Okay great - 10 hours tops! You have at least 10 - 15 hours of prep work for every hour of the event. If you don't enjoy the journey the results will look too small and some how there wasn't enough - something.
• We have lost sight in our culture of what a wedding ought to be. It ought to be family and friends gathering and celebrating the creation of a new family. It ought to be about the relationships and not the event planning.

Now I will say Erik and Jessa have been very reasonable in their standards of preparing for this wedding. It is going to be fun and it is going to be over too quickly. But wedding excess has infected our land and it not going to go away any time soon.