I wasn’t sure what part of my son’s wedding would make me choke back tears. I knew it was coming—it always comes at some point, even at weddings where I barely know the couple. But how to handle the wedding of my oldest son?
Lined up outside the covered, open-air chapel, standing next to my wife of 23 years (she looked as radiant as ever), we were still running through last-minute details. How fast to walk. How to follow the wedding director’s cues. Where the photographer would be positioned.
The last time my wife and I walked down the aisle together, it was the recessional at the end of our own wedding, just before Christmas in 2002, on a snowy night in Romania. Now we were walking arm in arm again, this time near the beginning of a processional, as it was our son’s turn to meet his bride at the altar.
Once we took our places in the front row, I turned to watch the other couples proceeding in, and the emotions bubbled up faster than I’d expected. Groomsmen and bridesmaids. Then our younger two children—our daughter, heading to college this fall, arm in arm with our younger son, still in middle school. It was almost as if the future were sweeping in all at once. In a few years, it could be me walking her down the aisle to the smile of her waiting groom.
I had to wipe away tears when our son’s bride appeared at the far end of the aisle, the soft notes of “Canon in D” floating out across the chapel. This is always the moment that undoes me—not only because of my happiness for the bride and groom but because of the gospel overtones embedded in that single procession. The bride, resplendent in white. The groom, already beaming before she’d taken a few steps. The witnesses, risen to their feet to mark the sacred moment. In that brief walk, everything comes rushing together: the love of Jesus for his church, his sacrifice and promise to make her clean, the descent of the holy city in Revelation 21, the angels and archangels in stunned silence as the story of redemption reaches its climax. The covenant, unbroken forever.
A warm May breeze moved through the open chapel as we remained standing to sing two songs chosen by my son and his bride. The first was “The Love of God.”
Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made
Were every tree on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky
Standing there with those words in my mouth, I felt the love of God on full display, in the sheer excess of grace that would bring a man and woman together in holy matrimony as a testament to the love that is evermore the saints and angels’ song.
The second song moved from the commitment of the Lord to us in the gospel to the commitment of my son and his wife to the Lord in their marriage. “Jesus, Have It All” is a song of surrender—offering to King Jesus the heart, the will, the soul. Our hopes, our dreams, our world. And then the verse that got me:
Jesus, have Your church, Your love, Your bride
The joy for which You freely gave Your life
Radiant in white
Washed and purified
Jesus, have us all
There’s nothing quite like singing those words at a wedding, where the song of salvation mingles with the melody of marital promise.
I made it through the rest of the service dry-eyed, delighting in the simplicity of the ceremony and then swept up in the joy of the recessional. The reception was another highlight—glowing faces, great food, a college friend of Timothy’s who broadcasted songs from a playlist that mixed contemporary songs with songs that have been beloved for decades. Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” came on at some point, with the line that always gets me:
I found a love to carry more than just my secrets
To carry love,
to carry children of our own.
Then the voice of Karen Carpenter filled the hall. Seated across from my parents, I thought about “We’ve Only Just Begun,” the song that played at their wedding in 1980—just 10 months before they welcomed me into the world. And this, too, made me think of the gospel: the fruitfulness of salvation, how covenant love overflows and brings new life into the world. What magic! That 45 years later, those young newlyweds who sealed their commitment can look not only at their children but at a grandson getting married. Should the Lord bless my son and his wife with children, and should he give me and my wife a long life, we may one day witness the same: our grandchildren entering this most holy estate.
As the evening wound down, my son and his bride walked through a tunnel of sparklers, with friends and family cheering them toward the car that would carry them off to their honeymoon. I stood watching until the taillights disappeared, and I couldn’t help but feel wistful. This moment was different from sending our son off to college a few years ago. That departure was temporary, punctuated by holidays and summers, with his old room still waiting for him. Now he has hived off. He has begun a family of his own, and our home will never be the same. There’s something so right about all of it, so joyful, and yet there’s a sense of finality too. The closing of one chapter, the opening of another.
Through it all, gratitude is the overwhelming emotion. Gratitude for the love he and his wife have for Jesus. Gratitude for the inexpressible gift of being entrusted with children who somehow survived all our wrongheaded notions and imperfect parenting. Gratitude for all that marriage represents—from the coming together of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 to its fullest expression in Christ laying down his life for the church. And gratitude that on a warm May afternoon, under a chapel basking in plentiful sunshine, I got a glimpse of the old, old story all over again.
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