The Bride and Groom
"Ah, the bride. She had been dressed for hours if not days. No adrenaline was left in her body. Left alone with her father in the reception hall of the church while the march of the maidens went on and on, she had walked along the tables laden with gourmet goodies and absentmindedly sampled first the little pink and yellow and green mints. Then she picked through the silver bowls of mixed nuts and ate the pecans. Followed by a cheeseball or two, some black olives, a handful of glazed almonds, a little sausage with a frilly toothpick stuck in it, a couple of shrimps blanketed in bacon, and a cracker piled with liver pate. To wash this down - a glass of pink champagne. Her father gave it to her. To calm her nerves. What you noticed as the bride stood in the doorway was not her dress, but her face. White. For what was coming down the aisle was a living grenade with the pin pulled out. The bride threw up. Just as she walked by her mother. And by "threw up," I don't mean a polite little ladylike urp into her handkerchief. She puked. There's just no nice word for it. I mean, she hosed the front of the chancel - hitting two bridesmaids, the groom, a ringbearer, and me.... Only two people were seen smiling. One was the mother of the groom. And the other was the father of the bride. Fulghum explains how they pulled themselves together for a much quieter, gentler ceremony in the reception hall. And how "everybody cried, as people are supposed to do at weddings, mostly because the groom held the bride in his arms through the whole ceremony. And no groom ever kissed a bride more tenderly than he." But the best part of the story is that, ten years later, everybody was invited back for another party to celebrate this disaster. They watched the whole thing on three TV sets - the MOTB had had three video cameras going at once during the wedding. And this party was thrown by the Mother of the Bride herself. How could all these people rejoice when everything had gone wrong? Because, in spite of all the mess, the bride still got the groom. At the end of the day, that was all that mattered. The bride got the groom. Look at the promise that comes right near the very end of the Bible: "Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready." Heaven's groom gets the bride. The joy that is in store for God's people is so great that the only image that can do it justice is the joy between a lover and his beloved. Then we will see the wedding of which the greatest weddings on this earth have only been a dim foreshadowing."
- Robert Fulghum