Going into this wedding Em and I were trying to sort out what kind of event we wanted. There are so many options, giant and traditional, small and intimate, eloping. You can get married in a church, on a beach, in a backyard, in a registry. You can have big reception, a small reception, no reception. Extremely formal, fantastically casual or wonderfully fancy dressed. To sort through all our options we seem to have made ourselves an unwritten list of priorities. Talking Em about it this seems to be what our default list of priorities are. So far they’ve served us pretty well.
Jesus
We see marriage, ultimately, as a reflection of God’s love and commitment to his people in his son, Jesus. So if marriage is ultimately about pointing to Jesus then we wanted to make sure our wedding did the same. Mainly this will be expressed through how we do the ceremony, but hopefully it’ll be clear throughout the whole event.
Each Other
We want to make sure that at our wedding we marry each other. That’s crazy and innovative, but that’s important to us. It may seem obvious, but what it has meant is that we’ve cut out stuff that we’ve felt was unnecessary because we didn’t connect with it and it wasn’t really important to getting married. It’s been freeing, if there’s a tradition we felt was irrelevant, or unhelpful we could just toss it, if there’s something we like, we get to keep it. There’s a lot less that we’re doing just because “that’s what you do”, I’m happy about that.
Family and Friends
We also believe marriage is a commitment made within your community, you cannot do marriage alone. This means that we wanted our wedding to be something that celebrated that community. Certainly things would have been easier if we did it with a lot less people around, but we wanted to honour the fact that we don’t go through life alone, and marriages don’t succeed without the love and support of your friends and family. We’ve seen our wedding as a celebration with our friends and family, and hopefully in a small way, a gift to them.
Fun
Part of making our wedding a gift to others is these last two priorities. We want it to be fun. Weddings can sometimes be boring, tedious affairs. Ours may be too, but we want to do our best to make sure it’s as fun as possible. So the band, the sleepover, the bonfire, the flying fox, these are all part our commitment to fun.
Tasty Food
We love to eat. We love our food to be tasty. We love eating tasty food with others. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but happy tastebuds make for happy parties.
So when you put all those priorities into the mix, hopefully what comes out is our wedding. We’ll see. It may be a disaster, but we’ve given it a good shot to make a tasty, fun, friends and family filled, Frendrussi making, Jesus loving wedding. If you’re coming, you can judge for yourself. But if we fail, that’s ok.
As I’ve been saying all along, if by the end of the weekend we’re married and no-one has died, it’ll be a success. I’m hoping we can at least achieve that.
Photo by Averie Harvey (who is also our wedding photographer, that was probably priority 6, awesome photos)
