Feeling Sentimental

On Wednesday we got a wedding invitation in the mail.  We don’t get many of those anymore.  Old friends who were single when we met them have pretty much married off by now, and most of the new people we meet are the parents of our children’s friends.  We met our soon-to-be-married friends at church; they are in our Bible study group.  It’s nice that they invited us to the ceremony.

Unfortunately, the wedding is in North Carolina, and we won’t be able to make the trip.  I wish we could.  It would mean a lot to me to be there.  I am so happy for our friends and so much believe in their future together.  I realize (rather shame-facedly) that I am getting sentimental about two young people starting out their life together.  Maybe I’m getting old.

Certainly when I was younger I didn’t realize what marriage meant.  My husband and I got married anyway, in faith and love.  Almost fourteen years later, I know what marriage holds for our friends—the blessings and the challenges, the compromises and the sacrifices, the joys.  

I bumped into them at church one evening this spring, coming out from a pre-marital counseling session with our pastor.  My husband and I had pre-marital counseling, too.  It was hard to feel that our pastor’s advice applied to us, when we hadn’t faced those conflicts and disappointments yet.  Now we have.  I know they are also in store for our friends.

It isn’t the hardships that I have in mind, though, when I think about their upcoming marriage.  I have no advice to offer nor warnings to give.  I am just so glad to think that their lives will be happier, more blessed, more wonderful because they are living them together.  This is what I know now, after fourteen years of marriage.  How sentimental weddings will make me when I really am old.