wedding 'bells'!

Every wedding's different!

And some more so than others. Like today's. We started the service eventually a mere 72 minutes later than originally planned - a new record for me!

I don't mean I was that late! In fact I was there about an hour before the thing was due to start. I mean simply that hitherto the longest time I've had to wait for a bride to arrive was bang on the hour mark.

Bride's prerogative, and all that sort of thing. Though this, I would say, was stretching the sense of any such bridal 'prerogative'!

The photographer said, That'll teach you! She'd been along on Thursday night for the usual pre-wedding rehearsal. And I'd told them then, all jokingly, that if they wanted to beat my record, then an hour was the time to beat. I did add that if they planned on that it would be helpful to have some notice!

Well, I did get some notice, to be perfectly fair. Not long after 2pm.

The bride had been caught in a fire alarm along at the Carlton Hotel, where she and her folk had been staying. And of course when that happens, well, you have to get out and they all had to wait 'til the fire brigade came and checked the place out. And, then she had to get dressed. As in kitted out in her bridal dress. Which is hardly the quickest routine!

Given that this was the hotel in town where the reception was due to be held, I hoped (for their sakes) that it wasn't a fire in the kitchens which had triggered the whole escapade!

It makes for lasting memories - that's for sure. And surely that's the way it's meant to be.

Wedding's don't always go quite the way they're planned to go. So I took my cue from the story that John told about the wedding where things didn't go to plan. How Jesus had been present there and how the line his mother took was very much the line we're all to take.

Do whatever he tells you. Words of lasting wisdom from a mother's lips.

It wasn't what I'd planned to say. But then the service as a whole had somehow changed.

Not just because the start had been delayed and timings were thus tighter in a way: but more because the bride herself seemed either very much affected by events, or simply overcome by all her nerves. It was hard to say. I just was aware that things were not as planned. In any sense.

Sometimes it's like that. The need to adjust. To do some pretty major thinking on the spot.

The wedding at Cana's a good case in point. And its lessons are simple and clear: for weddings and everything else.

Make sure that Jesus is there. And then just go ahead and do whatever he tells you. It's a kind of scary, but exciting way to live my life!