Weddingbee Blog

Around these parts all I seem to be doing is tyin’ up all the loose ends! Email here, details there…it’s a constant back and forth. I’d thought I’d take a minute to stop and reflect on the most important part of our wedding day, the ceremony. Mr.O and I will be married by the Pastor of the Lutheran Church I grew up in. During our initial meeting with him we discussed all the usuals like marriage counseling and ceremony planning. Basically he told us he could give us four options for ceremonies and then we could splice and dice and add and combine them any way we wanted. This was the perfect compromise for us. It has allowed us to incorporate some of the traditional elements of a church wedding with our own personalities added in. In order to perfect the flow we searched all over the internet for examples. We found that generally church ceremonies are laid out similar to this, give or take the placement of a few parts:

• Processional
• Welcome
• Opening (usually with a prayer)
• Readings
• Statement of Intent
• Words of Encouragement (which may be long or short- for some services it’s an entire sermon)
• Vows
• Exchanging of Rings
• Announcement/Proclomation of Marriage
• Prayer
• Communion (if your church does this)/ Unity Candle
• The Kiss!
• Recessional

Our ceremony looks more like this:

• Processional
• Welcome
• Opening (with a prayer)
• Readings
• Statement of Intent
• Words of Encouragement
• Vows
• Exchanging of Rings
• Announcement/Proclomation of Marriage
• Family Prayer
• Communion (if your church does this)/
• Unity Candle
• Knot Tying Ceremony
• The Kiss!
• Recessional

We nixed the statement of intent…the part where most people say “I do” or “I will.” Instead we picked vows that we really liked that were slightly more wordy.

I take you Miss O/Mr.O, to be my wife/husband and these things I promise you.

I will be faithful to you and honest with you;

I will respect, trust, help, and care for you;

I will share my life with you;

I will forgive you as we have been forgiven,

and I will try with you to better understand ourselves, the world, and God through the best and

worst of what is to come as long as we live.

The bride and groom exchange rings with these words:

I give you this ring as a sign of my love and faithfulness.

Instead of having the usual blessing over our marriage after we say our vows, we have decided to have our immediate families come forward and put their hands on us as the Pastor prays. Because we have a small wedding party, we really want to make sure our family is at the forefront of the ceremony.

We have decided against doing communion or a unity candle, mostly because if we end up being outside, it would be hard to coordinate a table with those items on it that won’t block the view of the pond behind us. To seal the deal, we have instead decided to tie a triple fisherman’s knot in front of our congregation. Our mothers are going to come forward, each bringing Mr.O and I a piece of rope. Forever by Ben Harper will play while we work together to do this:

I really like the way the knot is tied…the two parts coming together at the end to make the knot stronger. It is supposed to represent our families coming together in our marriage, kind of like the combining of sand in a sand ceremony or the lighting of a unity candle.

Last night we went to Lowes and bought some rope. We practiced for about 20 minutes and have the motion of tying the knot in the air while the other one holds the ropes down to a science.

The rope we bought… the width is big enough to see from far away but still easy to tie.

One of our practice knots! We’ll put the real thing in a shadow box to display after the wedding!

Because we were able to really customize our ceremony, I am really looking forward to that part of the day. I think it’s going to be meaningful, personal, and unique.

Anyone else splice and dice to come up with their perfect ceremony? Who is brave like Miss Wizard and writing the WHOLE THING?