This summer I read the book, Inviting God to your Wedding by Martha Williamson. This book is considered by many to be the “”wedding handbook” for your spirit and your soul”. It is Martha and Jon’s account of the beautiful discoveries that they went through when they put God first in their engagement AND wedding. As she wrote, “In the months before our wedding, I searched the shelves of my favorite bookstores for a wedding book that I never found: A book that would celebrate my joy and acknowledge my fears. A book that would be a silent friend that wouldn’t overwhelm me with week-by-week checklists and endless pictures of table settings. . . . I knew that before I began organizing the most important event of my life, I needed to organize my heart.”
I read that book from two perspectives. One as a woman whose own marriage had forgotten to keep God in its center and subsequently fell from the surmounting stress that it encountered and second as a R.I. Officiant who is the Minister and Spiritual Guide of over a hundred couples who have united in marriage.
I have been asked over the years (usually in jest) if my role as a R.I. officiant for a couple guarantees that my magical properties of positivity, love, and joyful blessings will keep their marriage strong throughout the century. I have smiled, I have gone along and insured these people that the couple will indeed have a happy marriage and I have hoped. The truth we know is that the marriage is only as strong as what the couple adds to it from the moment that they say “I do”.
I believe that when a Loving higher power becomes the third person in the engagement and marriage that what we humans bring that are harmful can be made right. There is power in identifying a Spiritual force in ones life whether it comes rooted in doctrine and Holy text or flows into your hearts from a place of knowing and truth. Transparency is a good thing when held in the arms of a loving, forgiving, compassionate and nourishing Being who then fills the two spouses with the same gifts of love, forgiveness, compassion and nourishment that can be shared! A couple’s relationship grows stronger from exercising the struggles of life when the moments of relief can be filled by Spirit. Love is a constant, ever present and forever resource to us all.
I am called to Invite Love to your wedding with you. I am a Spiritual Guide who will pray with you, be open with you and rejoice with you when you say “I do”. I will share your first meal with you as newly married and I will pray with you over the years for your strong and healthy lives and marriage. All things come through us from Love and I am called to honor the sacredness of you and your marriage as we Invite God to your Wedding.