Wedding Colors

While the sky was still dark, I quietly slipped out of the cabin and escaped to a place called “sunrise point” on the eastern side of Mt. Nebo. You know I wasn’t going to miss this. 

I had gone to bed only a few hours earlier, considering that the cabin contained a crew of six bridesmaids and one excited bride on the night before her wedding. A cookie log, a showing of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and hours of reminiscing, story telling, and dreaming of the future kept us up later than we predicted, but not too late to keep me from the sunrise. 

I knew the day would hold lots of dresses, dolling up, and dainty things...so I set out for a little romancing of my own before the day began. 

When the glorious colors of orange and pink whisked the night away and the clouds swirled together with new shades of daytime blue, as dawn took the earth by the eyes, I knew God was meeting me there, loving me, and reminding me that the same glory in the colors of the sunrise are found in the colors of weddings, too. 

Burgundy wine bridesmaid dresses, the bride’s pink shoes, splashes of living green in bouquets, everything ivory white. Weddings are beautiful, and you just can’t go through one without thinking about Christ. 

As the groom has been wooing and pursuing his bride with loving adoration, so it reminds us of how Christ is chasing after us. As the bride feels her best in her pureness of white, so has he adorned us in the whiteness of his righteousness. As the husband invites the bride into a forever relationship through a proposal, so Christ has invited us into an eternal relationship through the cross. As both commit to loving one another no matter what, so Christ commits to us and us to him. As the Lord is a husband, his bride is His Church, and the Word of God tells us that this is the design and holiness of marriage - a tangible representation of Christ’s love for his church. And a wedding is the visible reminder of how we, the bride, prepare ourselves for his coming.

A wedding with all its colors and a sunrise with all its colors writes this fresh on my heart.

The color red pours into the cup and onto the lips of the brides of Christ gathered in the cabin that Sunday wedding morning. The whiteness of the bread, broken and given for each of us. As we share this holy moment together, we remember together. In the wildness of a wedding day, we pause to remember Christ, the one who loved us first. Our first love. 

I am reminded that in Jewish culture, a man would propose to a woman by offering her a cup of wine, and accepting it was her way of saying yes. Communion is a marriage proposal. 

I hold a bouquet of pale pink and rich red flowers, sprinkled with sparkles of baby’s breath. The colors remind me of the sunrise. I watch the bride walk down the aisle, radiating, and the groom waiting for her, beaming. And I feel the warmth of the sunrise on my face and the taste of the red wine on my lips. Christ, our bridegroom, is coming soon.