A Gift Worth Seeing

You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride; you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace.

—Song of Songs 4:9

Sometimes when life gets really busy, I can get so caught up in the chaos that I risk losing sight of the reason for it all. For instance, a to-do list for a rehearsal dinner at our house hid the story of my sister-in-law, Amy, whose wedding we were celebrating the next day. That night, over chicken korma and tandoori, two families told stories and laughed and prayed together, anticipating the next day’s ceremony. After a decade of broken, painful relationships, Amy stood looking out over our city, surrounded by both families, as she married Austin, a man who is all of the things she hoped for. She was a glowing bride, flushed with beauty and even more so with love. The day of her wedding to Austin began a new thing in her, a beautiful, lively, hopeful, generous way of living, a woman in full bloom. That’s the luminous, beautiful thing hiding underneath the blur of the menu and the seating and the candles. What looked, on the calendar and the to-do list, like a dinner was actually one of God’s best gifts, worth celebrating, worth seeing.