...ceremony details: the flowers...

I have been hesitating to write about this for the last few days because I need to tread lightly as I tell this story.  As with every wedding, ours was not without its snafus.  The situation surrounding our floral needs definitely became one of them.  This is kind of what happened in a nutshell…

DG’s sister got married a little less than a year before we did.  Her wedding was gorgeous, to say the least.  Largely due to the efforts of a distant cousin who does event design and floral for a living (and beautifully, I might add).  He was willing to basically donate his time and my SIL covered his costs and purchased the flowers at wholesale.  This equation worked really well for her, so it made perfect sense for us to do the same. 

Well, somewhere between a naïvely planned floral budget, a couple of assumptions, and some severe miscommunication…that arrangement completely fell apart, and we learned that said cousin would not be coming….PRECISELY TWO WEEKS BEFORE OUR WEDDING.  I don’t want to speak badly about him because he is family and because if I had been much smarter….I could have prevented every ounce of heartache and panic we suffered when DG and I looked at each other like WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO NOW?  In the end, everything worked out for the better.  We were able to spend less money and I could not have been happier about the way our flowers looked.

So the absolute hero in this story???  Our dear friend Troy.  Troy just so happened to arrange all the flowers for my MOH’s wedding back in October, and they were perfect.  He has a 9-5 just like everyone else, but he’ll do weddings here and there simply because he’s talented and he can.  So Troy had ZERO notice, but we called him up one night and said, “We need a florist.  We have $1,000.”  He was more than happy to jump in and take over.  I was blown away by how he pulled it all together.  I won’t spoil all the surprise of our details for the reception, but here’s what he did for our ceremony.

This display, welcoming our guests in the entryway, was a bit of a sneak peak of our reception decor.

Altar arrangements.

And a close up.

My bouquet.

He did a lovely job incorporating the picture of my grandma who passed away last Thanksgiving.

DG's boutonniere, #1.  Troy is so smart.  He always makes two boutonnieres for the groom, knowing that inevitably the first one will be crushed at some point by an unstoppable hugger.  DG's didn't even make it to the ceremony if I remember correctly.

More pretty bouquets for all my girls.

And here's a close up of the cute little carnation pomander Troy made for our flower girl.

Now, what have we learned?  If you are in the thick of planning and need a little guidance, learn from our mistakes and follow this advice…

1.       The first thing out of your mouth after, “Hello, my name is bride-to-be,” should be “We’re working with a budget of $X.XX, and this is what we need from that money.”  Whether you’ve gathered a group of friends to accomplish a certain task or a family member is handling a project or you’re working with a bonafide professional vendor.  DO. NOT. SKIP. THIS. STEP.  Maybe you’ll learn that you haven’t yet found the right person for the job, or maybe you’ll give that person an opportunity to find creative ways to cut extra cost.  Either way, you’ll be grateful you talked about it up front.  Like I said before, I could have prevented a lot of crying…

2.       Work with talented, creative people and set them free to create.  I know very little about flowers.  I just know what I think is pretty.  When it came to the actual design for our flowers, I gave Troy an idea of the overall aesthetic theme we were shooting for and a color palette and left the rest to him.  I understand that, to some brides, flowers are the one thing that has to be just so.  They weren’t a huge priority for me.  I didn’t have to have any one certain bloom.  I just wanted them to look nice and fit in with the other décor.  So when Troy came to me with suggestions, I said yes to every one and just let him do what he does.  That’s why we called him in the first place.  The result was SO MUCH BETTER than anything I could have dictated to him!

Finally, if you’re a bride looking for an affordable florist who is talented, oh-so-easy to work with, and is willing to work within ANY budget…please consider Troy.  He and his wife are great people and so much fun, and I promise, he’s fantastic.  In our case, he came in under our budget, even after he’d added fees for himself, but we decided to give him the full $1,000 anyway because we were so grateful and so impressed.  Troy isn’t exactly running a floral business, but he has given me permission to give out his email address to anyone who may be interested, so shoot me an email at enoughforeverafter(at)gmail.com if you want his contact info! 

As always, thanks to Will at Will Knowles Weddings for all these pretty pictures.

...best song about marriage ever...

I’ve been a little behind in blogging this week because our world sort of got turned upside down last Wednesday night when my new sister-in-law fell and broke her leg in two places.  Bless her heart, she’s a trooper.  We all rallied to make sure she was taken care of, and things are slowly returning back to normal….for the rest of us anyway. 

I have been impatiently waiting for my new Macbook to arrive, figuring I would want a thousand reasons to sit in front of it for hours when it finally arrived.  Little did I know, DG picked it up last night after work.  He randomly pulled it out of the closet after dinner.  I was so excited, I could hardly contain myself!

So this morning, anxious to put my pretty new iTouch to good use, I downloaded this album I had been wanting to purchase.  As a long time fan of Andrew Peterson, I knew to expect it to get to me.  He is a storyteller like none other, and I’ve never made it through an entire album of his without breaking down into tears.  It just happens that way.  Today was no exception.  I happily plugged my iPod into the car stereo on my way to work, and two tracks in, I was met with this song. 

It’s the kind of song you wish you’d written because it says everything you’ve been wanting to say but didn’t know how.  To some degree, I know it spoke to me so profoundly because of my situation.  And here’s the moment of honesty….I was prepared for nothing other than sheer bliss in the first months of our marriage…convinced that we would experience only utter joy and satisfaction.  Maybe I was just that naïve.  Or maybe DG and I have just come up against something more difficult than we expected.  Whatever the case, the last three months have been consumed with some very challenging, private struggles.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I think the struggle has been productive.  I think we’ve navigated it very well, and our love and the depth of our commitment are literally strengthened by the day.  I can say without a doubt that I love DG more and have a greater appreciation for and understanding of him today than I did on May 1^st.   But that being said, it has been HARD.  We have encountered moments of complete desperation, difficult misunderstandings, and painful insecurity.  Often times I really have felt like we are “dancing in the minefield.”  And really, at present, there is no relief in sight.  No real promise of when things will get better and we’ll arrive at the resolution we’ve been praying for. 

But here’s what I know…I love him.  To the depth of my soul, I love him….and at its most basic form, that love is dangerous.  There are risks.  It means giving up myself.  Putting his needs, his dreams, his desires in front of my own.  It means being more invested in his happiness than even he is…than I am in my own.  It means saying the truth even when the truth is hard, when I can’t predict his response.  It means that I keep talking when I feel like shutting down and I keep listening when I’d rather say, “Enough already.”  Love is by no means safe.  Adventurous and exciting and worth it?  Absolutely.  But it is not safe.  He holds my heart, which means he has the power to absolutely obliterate me….but he has earned my trust.   And he has demonstrated his love time and time again. 

This road is not easy.  We are clumsy, but we are making it.  And I know we are growing closer and stronger and there will come a day when we will look back with gratitude and point to this time as the thing that built our foundation.  The Ever After is unknown, and I am confident that this is not the last season of life that will push us.  Still, there is only one person I would want to travel alongside in the uncertain and sometimes heartbreaking circumstances of this life.  It just so happens I’m lucky enough to be his wife.  For me, that knowledge is enough.

For you wives who are doing your best to love your husband rightly in the midst of less than perfect circumstances…for those of you who are engaged and looking forward to the reality of marriage….for the girls who have yet to meet the man they dream of….I encourage you to really pay attention to this song.  It’s a striking portrait of the way love works in real life, on the ground.  Take it to heart.

...ceremony details: custom built decor...

Though DG and I LOVED the look and feel of Edgefield Baptist Church in East Nashville, we had a few concerns about the space.   As you can see, there’s some really obvious gold lettering over the baptismal area.  We weren't really feelin' it, but we set out to find a solution.  The people at Edgefield were so so easy to work with, and I their wedding policies are some of the most reasonable I encountered.  That being said, they understandably have policies in place to protect the integrity of the building itself. 

We were not allowed to fix anything to the walls, no tacking things to pews, etc., so we did some brainstorming to come up with a solution.  We talked about renting columns of some kind, but we only found tacky white plastic columns or black wooden ones that were far too contemporary for our theme.  We talked about building some, but it seemed that was too big an undertaking.  Ultimately, we settled on a strategy that was two-fold.  First, we wanted to ensure our guests didn’t miss the meaning in all of the lyrics and scripture in our ceremony, so we had the friend who designed our website design content to project onto the screen.  This covered most of the lettering.  It was mostly just ambiant, abstract color and the text. Unfortunatly it wasn’t really captured in the photos, but it worked well and was both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Our other objective was simply to give our guests a focal point.  Something nice to look at.  We discussed a variety of options, and finally settled on a cross.  After a series of drafts for this project, here’s what we did.  We bought a four by eight foot piece of plywood and some simple decorative molding.  My dad and I spent an evening sometime last March measuring and cutting the moldings to fit.  The following morning my mom and I stained it to match the woodwork in the church.  Once it was dry, Dad and I assembled the entire piece.  I wish I had pictures of the whole step by step, but of course, at the time, I was more concerned with completing the project than documenting it.  We purchased this wrought iron cross for something like $10 at Hobby Lobby and sprayed it gold then mounted it in the center.  Dad used fishing line to support it at the church, and when it was all put together, it provided the perfect backdrop for our ceremony.  All in all, we probably spent about $50 or $60 on the project.  By far one of our best decisions, in my opinion!  What do you think of our finished product??

Just goes to show you that a little ingenuity can go a really, really long way!  Have any of you other brides had friends or family custom build pieces for your wedding?

...happy birthday to me...

We interrupt your regularly scheduled wedding-related programming to talk about how utterly fabulous the people in my life are.  I mean, I’m not one to brag, but I have THE most amazing husband and family and friends one could hope for.  You wish you were me. I’ve spent all day feeling so very loved and appreciated!

It all started when DG woke rolled over first thing this morning to give me a big hug and his very best rendition of “Happty Birfday”.  It was compelling, to say the least.  At about 7:00 AM, my phone rang.  My baby brother, who is currently somewhere in Indiana called to sing Happy Birthday.  At about 7:10 AM, my best friend called to yell, “Happy Birthday!  I’ll email you shortly when I get to work!”  At about 7:15 AM, my other best friend called to sing yet another birthday song and to let me know that she had to explain to her two little ones that 6:00 AM in Toronto is 5:00 AM in Nashville, which is much too early to call Auntie Racheal and sing.  On my drive to work I got a tex mex (that’s what all the cool kids call text messaging J ) from both my sisters-in-law.  When I logged in to my email, I was met with a message from my Mimi back home explaining all about the card she’d bought that she finally put in the mail and on and on.  She’s cute.  My coworkers took me out to lunch and bought me cupcakes and a card AND! stood in a circle in the middle of all our cubicles in the office building to sing, yet again.  My sweet mother-in-law called to wish me happy birthday just a few minutes ago.  How many birthday wishes can one girl take?!  Seriously people.!

And most exciting of all…this is how much my dear husband loves me on my birthday!

And this was included as part an Apple promotion FOR FREE.  I am pretty hyped.

As I write this, it is currently  4:15 PM on August 11^th.  I know the well-wishing is not over, and I am already overwhelmed by the amount of love in my life.  Everywhere I look, I am met with people I love to my very core…who love me in return.  It is the greatest feeling in the world.  I am so grateful.  27 was a good year.  I fell even more deeply in love…got engaged…crafted the wedding of our dreams…and walked away married to the greatest man alive.  Who knows what 28 will hold?  A part of me hopes for a lot of things to dramatically change.  Another clings to hold on to what’s familiar and comfortable.  All I know is this, if these are the people I have to keep me company along the way, I’m going to be more than fine.

So yeah, Happy Birthday to me!

...our traditional wedding ceremony: part two...

After lighting the unity candle, we chose to serve communion to all of our guests.  Considering our objective was to move the focus of our away from just DG and me toward us, as a couple, within the larger context of our friends and family…and ultimately Christ and the Church…it was especially important to us to celebrate with our loved ones this way.

First, my dear, dear friend Shreyas sang this prayer. (The Lord’s Prayer by Albert Hay Malotte)

Then our officiant blessed the elements.

As our guests were served, the choir sang  Open Thou Mine Eyes by Benjamin Harlan.  Unfortunately, despite scouring the internet for a video or recording of this song…I came up empty handed.  It was by far the most contemporary and “pop-iest” piece of those I selected, but I fell in love with it a couple of years ago when I was on staff singing in a church choir back home.  The lyrics are based on a prayer by Lancelot Andrewes and I just thought they were so beautiful.

Open thou mine eyes and I shall see.

Open thou mine ears and I shall hear.

Incline my heart, I shall desire.

Order my steps and I will walk the ways of thy commandments.

Oh Lord my God, be thou to me a God that I may love you.

That I may worship you.  And adore you.

That I may follow you.  That I may look to you.

Open thou mine eyes and I shall see.

Open thou mine ears and I shall hear.

Incline my heart, I shall desire.

Order my steps and I will walk the ways of thy commandments.

After communion was our blessing and pronouncement of marriage, followed by our discreet church kiss….which may not have actually been ALL that discreet.

Our guests stood to receive the benediction as the choir sang The Lord Bless You and Keep You by John Rutter.

Then of course we took a bow.  Perfectly appropriate.

 And now we're married!

Time for the reception!  I'm so excited to share what we did.  Bear with me, because it's going to take a little time, but I think you'll like what you see!  Stay tuned.

...our traditional wedding ceremony: part one...

I wouldn't be surprised if a few of our guests were a little taken back by the formailty of our wedding ceremony.  We worked closely with our dear friend, who officiated, to choose every last word carefully.  We included a lot of very traditional liturgical elements that were probably a little foreign to most of our family and not even very characteristic of the churches we grew up in.  Still, we wanted the focus of the entire ceremony to really capture the fact that we are a part of something bigger...that our love story is only a thread in the tapestry.  I think we communicated that beautifully.

Following the greeting, opening prayer, declaration of intent (Will you?...Will you?), and the declaration of consent (Her mother and I.), our minister said a few words to express our gratitude to our family and friends for their support and so on.  Then came my favorite part, as everyone was invited to stand, and all of the most meaningful people in our lives lifted their voices together to sing Great is Thy Faithfulness.  The sound was overwhelming, and I really can't put into words how that moment felt.  To be united with all our loved ones in that way was really incredible....and no matter how many times I've sung it in this lifetime, the lyrics to that hymn never fail to touch me at the deepest level.

We went on to recite The Apostles' Creed together followed by another prayer, a reading from Colossians 3:12-17 and our ministers breif little homily based on that text.

After the homily, DG and I read the "statements" we'd written for each other.  We wanted to be able to write something for the ceremony, but I still really loved the idea of saying traditional vows....knowing that my mom and dad said the same words to each other when they were married, and my grandparents before them.  So instead of writing vows, we inserted a little extra time to read what we'd written for eachother.  Here I'm explaining to DG that I'd always dreamed about the man I would meet and marry and how great he'd be and on and on.  And that the best part of that day was not so much that I'd found that man, or that he was even better than I had hoped....but that "he" is DG.  I said it a lot more eloquently at the time....but for the life of me, I have no idea what happened to that little piece of paper.  Otherwise, I'd put it here verbatim.

And this is when DG started to cry uncontrollably.  Bless him.  He started to say something like "Words can't describe the joy you've brought into my life,"  but he got stuck at joy....so it just came out "Words can't describe the...."  and then this face.

And this face.

Bless him.  So next we did the traditional exchange of vows and exchange of rings.  You know, for better or for worse, etc...

That was followed by my favorite prayer of the whole ceremony.  These words are just beautiful to me.

Eternal God, creator and preserver of all life, author of salvation, and giver of all grace: Look with favor upon the world you have made, and for which your Son gave his life, and especially upon Racheal and David.

Give them wisdom and devotion in the ordering of their common life, that each may be to the other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy. Amen.

Grant that their wills may be so knit together in your will, and their spirits in your Spirit, that they may grow in love and peace with you and with one another all the days of their life. Amen.

Give them grace, when they hurt each other, to recognize and acknowledge their fault, and to seek each other’s forgiveness and yours. Amen.

Make their life together a sign of Christ’s love to this hurting and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, and forgiveness and healing conquer despair. Amen.

Give them such fulfillment of their mutual affection that they may reach out in love and concern for others. Amen.
Grant that all married persons who have witnessed these vows may find their lives strengthened and their loyalties confirmed. We ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

Beautiful, no? Next was the lighting of the unity candle, during which the choir sang Set me as a Seal by Renee Clausen.

I think we'll leave off there before this post becomes eight pages long.  Part two to come!