Winter Wedding

Whiteouts and iced-up wiper blades could not prevent us from reaching Niagara On the Lake where a young couple and their twenty guests gathered in a small Anglican Church for a winter wedding. As the gale winds battered the church, we listened to the bride and groom say their vows. The groom's family, a very musical family, sang a blessing to them. Then we formed a circle around them, laid our hands on them, and offered up sentence prayers to God. On the table, the license and Christ Church's Marriage Registry lay open, all the signatures properly and legally inscribed. The flame of the unity candle flickered slightly in the breeze, not so much from the strong winds outside as from the prayers we breathed up to the One who came up with the idea of two people becoming one. How good is this idea? Thousands of years and millions of weddings later, it still has the power to draw people together in the worst conditions to hear and see the two best things that a couple can exchange: a promise for life and a kiss to seal their commitment.