Weddingbee Blog

Well, folks. It was inevitable. Plans have been coming together too easily. Things were falling into place too neatly. It was only a matter of time until something major happened, and that time was this past Thursday.

On that fateful day, I was in the local drugstore, shopping for soap, when I got a call from the pastor who I had asked last May to perform our ceremony. Since I had been trying to get in touch with him about beginning our premarital counseling, I thought he was calling to set up our first session.

Boy was I wrong.

Instead of a warm, fuzzy discussion of beginning our marriage counseling, it was a cold, prickly talk about how the pastor could no longer commit himself to performing our wedding ceremony.

Um, what?!

He basically told me that it has been too difficult to get together with us to start our counseling (even though I’ve basically been incessantly trying to contact him since January with no response), and he doesn’t feel comfortable marrying us. He told me that while he thinks I am a wonderful person, he likes to get to know his couples really well, and he doesn’t think that can happen at this point.

I immediately felt myself tearing up, so I thanked him for his honesty and hung up the phone as quickly as possible. There’s nothing worse than crying on the phone. So there I was, standing in front of the soap display in a drugstore, trying to hold in the tears but not really succeeding. I felt like a pariah: rejected, and completely disappointed.

There are four months until our wedding, and we have no pastor.

I mean, does this happen? I have never heard of a pastor backing out - the officiant is basically the most important person in the wedding ceremony. Legally marrying each other is the whole point!

And beyond that, I have wanted this pastor to perform our wedding ceremony for a long time. Ever since I met him, really. So it is heartbreaking to me to have to let go of that dream, and to accept the fact that someone I don’t know is going to be marrying me to my love.

After a terrible two days of crying, feeling incredibly angry, and trying to consider our options, we have found another pastor.  He is nice, and has graciously volunteered to perform our ceremony and give us premarital counseling. He is someone who we can hopefully count on.

I know this is just a bump in the road, but it was a really huge, humiliating disappointment.

Have you hit a major roadblock in your journey to the altar? How did you handle it?

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