SUNDAY SERVICES:

It may seem a bit early to talk about Valentine’s Day, despite the fact that many retail stores have had cards and candy out since just before the glow of the Christmas lights faded. To be honest, this epistle is about love, not the “special day” that greeting card companies and chocolatiers claim as the holiday of love.

When we are young, it is a flashy, fun and frivolous day of romance, if we are lucky. As we grow older and hopefully more mature, love begins to grow in dimension. Romance is still wonderful and much-needed, but real relationship suddenly transforms any one-dimensional perspective of love into something that defies easy explanation, something that must be experienced rather than defined.

“This life is sort of like a test for the next, preparation.  How we live here matters.”  That was my mother’s answer to a question, which I don’t recall as well as her response, that I asked her almost 6 decades ago.  It must have had to do with the meaning of life.  What else does a nine-year-old ask his parents?  After all too much time and theological education, I like her answer, yet I am still pondering what we can do that prepares us for eternal life.

Wedding photographers have an amazing task. They document both actions and feelings of a day in which multiple people with multiple tasks move around one another simultaneously with a single goal in mind.

“I do”, say the happy couple. Click.

Or, click, click, click, click, click, click.

Click.

Careful planning surely attends the planning of the photographer’s task list, as the images that every future bride and groom have seen in a movie’s happy ending or a bridal magazine are catalogued and sequenced.