November 01, 2013
Princess Bride
During the weeks leading up my daughter’s
wedding we brainstormed on the preparations, but all the suggestions stopped
with the caveat, ‘this is your wedding, so you need to have things the way you
want them.’ The choice in bridal gowns styles was almost overwhelming - long
length or tea length, sleeves or sleeveless, white or off-white. Interestingly,
Leslie made her final selection based not on current trends, or a specific
look, but rather on feelings. “I want to feel
like a princess.” All believers have given some consideration to the Lord’s
return, that wedding feast of the Lamb, when He claims the church as the Bride
of Christ. There will be rejoicing, however, I’m now wondering if I have been remiss
in not thinking more about how I will feel. “I
delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me
with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness, as a
bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with
her jewels.” (Isaiah 61:10 NIV)
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Gail;
-----Until not long ago I loathed feelings. I might have given you half-a-cent for feelings, but all the whole pennies I’d have spent on something else. At that time, I met the thought of how I would feel at the Lord’s return and His wedding feast with the greatest aversion. What might be my contemplation at His return more framed my interest.
-----It wasn’t that I had no feelings about things. It wasn’t that feelings did not move me. It was that I have always had too much feeling for things, and that those feelings too much move me. And that feelings are not rational by their own nature, in that they just are what they are, I perceived their danger. So there I was, full of them and passionate about whatever I took into hand, deeply at risk.
-----But when I realized meaning was the conceptual intersection of thought and emotion, feelings took on a whole new light. Finally they were graspable. They were no longer to me like ghosts or little sprites infesting and haunting my efforts to understand and react to things. I chuckle sometimes. Here I am, nearly sixty years old, still trying to figure out what’s second nature to most people since their twenties.
-----Maybe that was the Lord’s point for me. Though I wanted little truck with feelings, I knew how deeply invested the soul is in them. Though the meanings of another person’s feelings are foreign to me, they are life’s current to them. That made theirs more than respectable, it made them honorable to me, if I could only achieve a little obedience in spite of my own.
-----So on the one side of me I think how ridiculous is a bride’s obsessions with her wedding. Does she even realize the meanings its symbols will drive in all the guests are widely varying even though they be of the same kind? So what’s the big matter of all the exactitude?
-----It reminds me of the church in preparation over the centuries for her wedding. So intolerant of evil men, she exactly describes evil to the exclusion of love for fellow man. She brought personal meanings into union with the Word, expecting everyone alike to swallow the mix until the use of meanings nearly eclipsed the light of the Word, and debauchery multiplied unseen. Then pushing back at debauchery with theological prisms splitting the Word into various shades she warred against herself until the very people she was meant to persuade rejected. So having become alone in the world, she now pronounces herself rich and splendid. And the groom still comes. He still loves. His faithfulness does not wane.
-----There is nothing a groom can do about his bride’s exactitude over detail except to love and admire and cherish and honor. For since the Lord yet loves the church in spite of all her history, the same is for the bride from her groom. (Ephesians 6:25-28) Nothing in this world can be more precious and full of feeling to a groom than the affects of his bride's preparations to meet him.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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