One Sunday night after dinner, our daughter, Clare, brought us an invitation to her wedding: a blue Post-it note with three words she had written, “Wedding! Yay! Come!” In the beauty of the backstory, Clare and her friend, whose family had come over for dinner, decided that six was the prime age at which to get married. So over the course of half an hour, they planned out their entire wedding, assigned roles for everyone, and then “got married.” (In all honesty, it was nice to be the ring bearer instead of the pastor.)
As I looked at Clare’s wedding invitation, my mind kept going back to this passage from Revelation when an angel appears to John right before Jesus’s triumphant appearance in what is often called the “Second Coming” and announces the wedding feast of the Lamb: “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.” When I read those words and then say them aloud (because something truly beautiful occurs when we speak and hear the words of Scripture rather than just reading them silently), I immediately want my name to be on that invitation list. It feels like God has written the words, “Wedding! Yay! Come!” on a piece of paper and then offers it to each one of us.
The challenge is that right now we live in this strange, in-between time. The invitation has been sent to us all, and we have the choice whether to accept it or not. Yet we are still waiting for the wedding to begin. The wedding supper will be that moment when we move from the almost-but-not-yet time into the reality of seeing Christ’s return, of seeing the Kingdom of God made present on earth as it is in heaven. It’s a time for which I long, a day I await breathlessly—even though I have no way of knowing when it will come.