Royal Wedding

When I woke up at 4:45 a.m. yesterday to watch the Royal Wedding, I wondered if I was crazy.  After watching the celebration, I realized that something larger than a ceremony between two people was happening.

With the British royal wedding, people were entranced by the pageantry and the love story unfolding before them.  There was a sense of hope and joy at the future facing these two and the British Nation.  It struck me that despite our modern disregard for marriage, symbolically, we still crave it.  We want the fairy tale relationship.  We want the happily ever after.

Women love weddings - the drama, the beauty, the love-laced words, the joy and the hope.  Brides strive to look their best, spend hours planning the event, and afterwards, reliving it through photos and other media. We joke that more time is spent preparing for the ceremony than preparing for the marriage (and unfortunately, this is often true!).

God loves weddings.  Jesus performed his first miracle at a wedding.  God likes himself to a bridegroom in Old Testament prophecies.  Jesus talks about his bride, the Church.

As lovely as Catherine Middleton was yesterday, she pales in comparison to Christ's bride, the Church.  The eternal wedding will be one filled with even more hope and more love than anything we've ever seen or experienced.

Despite the pageantry of the royal wedding, the heralds at the Heavenly wedding of The King and His Bride will overshadow our earthly attempts at pageantry.

So perhaps in watching the royal wedding between Prince William and now Princess Catherine, we can glimpse a look at our future.