Considering his lover, the author of the ancient love story recorded in the Song of Songs penned these words, “How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful!…You have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes.”

As I understand it, the first glance for these two occurred in the seventh grade, as David was one of Jessica’s first boyfriends. Sadly, yet in true middle school fashion, they broke up that same year. But only to reunite their senior year of high school, thanks in part to a scheduling coincidence where they found themselves solving for derivatives together in Pre-Cal. And thanks also in part to the senior Prom, which they attended together.

Senior year of high school. Over five years ago.

Five years is enough time for love to be tested, refined to a certain extent, not complete, but cultivated with effort, experience, and counsel. For many, the choice of a marriage partner is one of the very freest choices we make as human beings. And if anything has been made clear to me from our conversations and from the words of your friends and family…it is that you, David, have chosen Jessica…and you, Jessica, have chosen David.Your choice consists not of a singular judgment but rather a series of decisions. And while most in attendance know how you have planned and thought and worked and waited throughout these years…we probably have no idea how you have anticipated this event.

Well it’s here.

…and it’s good.

And now is when I say, “Dearly beloved…”

photos: Callie Murray

In The Four Loves, the author CS Lewis recalls the days when he and his friends met regularly, pulling up chairs around a small table in an Oxford pub. He describes how one person at that table has the ability, just by being around, to bring something unique and different out of each of the others. For Lewis, when any one person at the table is surrounded by close friends, and when those close friends are all drawing out of the one something distinctive and something exceptional, then and only then is that person most wholly himself or herself. He writes, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”

This evening Ryan and Ashley want to take a moment of their wedding ceremony, the beginning in fact, to honor one of those friends, one who sits at their table, who is not able to be here today.

For the next eleven months, Josh Hemmings is on active duty in the Republic of Iraq. In your programs you will notice that he is named honorary groomsman because in Ashley’s words “he certainly would have been in the wedding party had he been in town.” Ryan and Ashley want to communicate their excitement that Josh’s family is in attendance in his place this evening. And as the harpist performs a rendition of “America the Beautiful,” I would like to invite us all to acknowledge the service and the friendship of Corporal Joshua Chandler Hemmings of the United States Marines.