The wedding portrait is displayed, front and center, in most every home you enter. My home is included. Children’s wedding photos, also, are spotlight illuminated. Here too, I gratefully, proudly and jubilantly share in this exhibition. Picture perfect happiness is captured in these remembrances of “I do”.
However, I’m often prone to wonder why we only half sketch our memory on the canvas. Each time we gaze upon our wedding portrait, beautiful reflections of the day our fairytale came true are relived. Perfect bliss abounded. Months and months of preparation brought forth the perfect celebration; but what about months, or years, later when a disaster might befall.
Could possibly the source for overcoming future tribulation have also been sewn into the seams of wedding day preparation? What about a couple’s premarital counselling? It’s so easy to put it on the shelf and never gaze upon it; but maybe it, too, should hold a forever frame for us to view its memory when life’s trials make its lessons needed to be heeded.
As two in love prepare to become one, wise guidance is part of the course preparation. However, not too sure many think this instruction any more vital than listening to a stewardess explain how to use a seat cushion for a floatable life vest in case of an emergency water landing when your flight’s route is over the Sahara Desert. Engaged couples aren’t prone to consider they will ever face an enraged moment with their soon to be forever spouse. Yet, life on earth is anything but perfect. Even the best of marriages will need to climb the toughest mountains; and sometimes, the amount of sweat and tears produced in scaling the precipices of life require rock climbing couples to just about need a life vest to keep from drowning!!!
How sad when only the reminder of the most perfect day on earth is all that adorns your walls. Thus, in not so sunny times, the only reflection radiating is of a day that doesn’t now seem to shine brightly at every given moment. What if, in addition, a second commemoration of your wedding was displayed? I propose all couples, before they close the final lesson of premarital counselling, decide upon a symbol representing the construction skills they learned. Maybe this symbolic token, if placed in prominence as the wedding portrait, will keep you tuned up for future repair when the road travelled is filled with potholes or in need of repaving. Moreover, when difficult times appear, instead of seeing only destruction, the view would include tools for reparation instead of separation.
The choice is every couple’s. Nothing wrong with just showcasing the fairytale, happy ever after, wedding portrait. Nonetheless, everything is also right with additionally displaying the reality that forever love sometimes relies on the toolbox of premarital counseling.
Uplifted in a Broken Down World 