With the age of Pinterest and bridal websites galore, wedding planning has become such an enormous commercial industry. As a bride-to-be, I’ve had to wade through the myriads of bridal advertisements that flood the inbox of my email, post on the ad space of every website that I visit, and pop up on every Facebook ad on my Newsfeed. Social media has definitely made wedding planning much more complicated with so many options and ideas. At my fingertips, there are millions of options and ideas for my wedding. It’s easy to turn into a bridezilla with so many expectations of how weddings should be.
Not only does this make decision-making difficult with the overwhelming flood of ideas, but it also stirs a discontentment in me as I start comparing the decisions I do make with other people’s ideas. I see a beautiful picture of a small destination wedding on the beaches of Hawaii, and I start to wonder if I made the right choice in keeping my wedding local with my 400 guests. I take a quiz on a wedding website to see what my “wedding personality” is like, and they tell me that “my dream wedding” would be a quaint wedding in a lovely vineyard or in the countryside, and I wonder that maybe I am missing out on my “dream wedding.” I read wedding blogs about how to prepare for the big day and the numerous diets there are out there to make sure I fit in the wedding dress, and I wonder if I should’ve eaten that huge dinner of barbecue the night before (oh but it was so tasty!)
Then people with good intentions give me numerous suggestions of how things should be, and I wonder if I’m making the right decisions. I start questioning myself, becoming insecure, getting stressed, and then taking the stress out on the people around me (which is often my fiance, Stanley, unfortunately for him). I am becoming a bridezilla. It is a vicious cycle trying to live as a people-pleaser, trying to gain other people’s approval, and live up to all of these expectations – both the ones that others have put on me and the ones I place on myself (which are usually more demanding, being the perfectionist that I am).
When I finally take a step back, breathe, pray, and ask God for peace in the midst of crippling stress and anxiety, that sometimes makes me want to just hide under my covers all day long, I realize that none of this really matters. At the end of the big day, none of the perfect Pinterest decorations, none of the beautiful venues, none of the “could be” or “should be” or “how about this” or “how about that” matters. At the end of it all, the only thing that really matters is that God loves me as His daughter and already approves of me. I don’t have to earn His love or approval by having the “perfect” wedding. At the of the day, all that matters is that I’m getting married to a godly man that loves God and loves me, who helps me see more of God’s unconditional love and grace every day, and who I enjoy being with. I am grateful for the Lord’s kindness in giving me Stanley as a gift to understand His love in new ways through marriage. The day of the wedding will be a day to celebrate with the people we love and appreciate the gift of community that God has given us to rejoice with us as we enter this new season of marriage together.
I also think about the bigger picture of marriage, and how it represents the relationship of Christ and His Church. Ultimately, marriage points to this amazing relationship, and whether married or single in this life, it all will fade away in light of the amazing joy we’ll have seeing our Heavenly Bridegroom and celebrating at the Great Banquet for eternity. It will be a beautiful day, and we will see the everlasting beauty of Christ as Phil Wickham so poetically writes,
“When we arrive at eternity’s shore
Where death is just a memory and tears are no more
We’ll enter in as the wedding bells ring
Your bride will come together and we’ll sing
You’re beautiful.”
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