anyway...

I thought I'd go down to the park today and sit and write for a bit, so now I'm camped out on a picnic table in the middle of a very flooded Vilas Park.  In fact, the ground under my feet is full of water and squishes every time I shift a little bit.  The flooding has been amazing.  I was looking at pictures of Burlington and it's like the whole town is under water.  And yet, the rain and storms seems to have brought new life that I've never seen before to the land.  Everything is so lush and a shade of green that I have never quite seen before, but only imagined.  And against the new blue of the sky, the dissonance of the color makes me a little bit emotional every so often.  There was a patch of trees on the way out to the wedding spot that was absolutely the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen.  The shade and sparkle of the waxy leaves against the sunlight took my breath away and if I hadn't been in such a hurry, I would have stopped and laid in the grass for a while beneath their shade.  

(haha...a 12-year-old-or-so kid just fell into the mud next to me as his brother was tackling him.)

Val was absolutely stunning yesterday.  And while that can probably be said about almost every bride, there truly was something impossibly beautiful about her yesterday.  The second I saw her an hour and a half before the wedding, I was driven to tears.  Without over analyzing every emotion involved with yesterday, I think it was a multi-faceted, complex array of emotions.  First of all, the look of pure and absolute joy mixed with the overwhelming nervousness of committing your life to another person (hi. frightening.) brings out that resonance once again that I always seem to find just unbelievable.  Getting to see that was emotional in itself for me.  Obviously, there's the ever-existent question of if I will ever be ready to make that sort of commitment, along with the question of, even if I am, will I ever find anyone willing to make that commitment to me...  But I really don't think that made a huge difference.  

But it was something different.  When I stopped to think about it while I was sitting on top of Tyrol Basin, after having climbed the entire thing barefoot and in a sundress with flowers in my hair to watch the sun go down (I know...typical me, right?), I realized something intriguing.  This beauty that came out in Val was not something that just happened yesterday on the day she wedded Brandon.  It was something that had developed over the course of months...since she and Brandon began their journey of becoming one.  Granted, they dated a shorter amount of time than many couples, but over the course of the last 10 months that they were dating, engaged and married, Val has grown in beauty.  I think that I noticed it many times throughout that period, but just never added them all up until yesterday.  

Brandon has brought out the elegant nature of a girl who, though confident and sure of herself, was not quite comfortable with allowing people to see it until him.  It does not mean that she was not complete until him, but rather that 2 people came together to emphasize the splendid uniqueness of one another.  

Simply put, he brought out an image of beauty in her that already existed.  

I guess this takes me to so many other places of thought...

It would seem that the same situation occurs when people are wedded to Christ.  There is a beauty that evolves and is uncovered from the depths when a person comes to be wedded and deeply committed to our Father.  I have seen it over and over again, especially in the house that I currently live in with anywhere from 6-8 other girls at any given time (not to mention the honorary members!)  They are never as beautiful as when they are drawing nearer to God.  The light in their faces when they ponder his goodness and faithfulness...  The radiance they exhibit when they discover a new attribute that they had never known before...

He brings out that uniqueness that He created in every person when people draw nearer to Him.  He created it and He brings it out when people return to Him.  

So perhaps that is what the beauty of a bride is actually.  It is the look of joy in a woman's face when she has found the man that draws her nearer and leads to her Creator, the one who instilled her with all of the beauty in the world.  

Maybe I'll come back to this...