Tara, Connie and Kristen have been creating a magical wonderland on our lawn for Talia and Joe's wedding banquet. I'll welcome our guests to the banquet with some words that we hope will set the mood. If you're there, you'll hear me say something like this:

"Karen and I want to welcome you to a party we've dreamed about for years. We serve an extravagant God who wants to love us extravagantly. When he wants to capture our imaginations and tell us about a kingdom we struggle to see, he compares it to a wedding banquet. He paints a fantastic picture.

Yet we were born into a world that is often harsh. Our dreams flicker like the candles around us tonight; they're easily snuffed out.

All her life, my first-born child, Talia, held the fragile, flickering dream of a husband who would love her and share a life of adventure, romance and laughter with her.

More times than I can count, she would walk into my office and ask, "Daddy, who am I going to marry?" Or she'd say, "Daddy, are you praying for my husband?"

She knew that God had put the dream in her heart; she just needed help believing it. And sometimes she would cry herself to sleep just fighting for this dream.

Tonight we are here because we are loved by an extravagant God who gives us impossible dreams and then makes them come true. Joe is Talia's knight in shining armor who drove four days across an entire continent because he held the same flickering dream of a love relationship worthy of the poetry in his heart.

Tonight our extravagant God has plunged us into the middle of the story of a glittering kingdom. We may have thought it only existed in the realm of words, but here we see that it's a reality. God is inviting us to enter a dream come true and walk around in it and even dance in it."