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.

We're a one car family. It works because I try to use my bicycle as much as possible. Last week, however, I wiped out on my bike. I didn't notice that the road was covered with a thin sheen of ice and when I turned into my first corner I slammed to the ground. It took my breath away and messed up my chain and my gears. It took me almost two hours to set my bike up again that night, and I've put it away until next spring.
But we're still a one car family, so how would I get to work on the days that Marja needs it to get to her job? I decided to walk. It 's 3.7 kilometres to the church and now I know that it takes just under thirty-three minutes. Cycling this distance, by the way, only takes nine minutes. But I've discovered that walking this distance is great. I see things I haven't seen before and I have time to think. And what I thought about this morning was how excited I was to come to the office and write a sermon about the simplest but most important message that we have for the world, that Jesus is the Son of God and that in Him we have eternal life and the power to overcome whatever the world throws at us (I John 5:1-13). A simple message birthed while engaged in the simplest of human activities: walking!