Yesterday I officiated the wedding of Lynette Lee and Arvin Bautista. It had been 30 years since Karen and I stood where they stood.

Karen had to call my bluff before I was able to come to grips with the fact that I couldn't live without her.  We began our life together with stars in our eyes, dreaming of how perfect it would be.

In spite of the odds stacked up against true love, we couldn't help ourselves from dreaming. In that sense, our wedding ceremony itself was like a dream, just as was Arvin and Lynette's ceremony.

It was a good time to reflect on something Frederick Buechner said about weddings being like dreams:

"A dream is a compression of time where the dreamer can live
through a whole constellation of events in no more time than it takes a curtain
to rustle in the room where he sleeps. In dreams time does not flow on so
much as it flows up, like water from a deep spring.

And in this way every wedding is a dream, and every word
that is spoken there means more than it says, and every gesture---the clasping
of hands, the giving of rings---is rich with mystery. Part of the mystery
is that Christ is there as he was in Cana
once, and the joy of a wedding, and maybe even sometimes the tears, are a
miracle that he works.

But when the wedding feast is over, he set his face toward Jerusalem and started out
for the hour when he too was to embrace the whole earth and water it with more
than his tears. And so it was also, we hope, with the bride and groom at Cana and with every bride and groom---that the love they
bear one another and the joy they take in one another may help them grow in
love for this whole troubled world."

It's a wonderful aspiration. And I'm betting that Arvin and Lynette's marriage will one day be a dream come true.