faith, hope, love and marriage!

I write this on my way back from an amazing weekend with friends in Cape Town!

As an aside it never ceases to amaze me just how incredible technology is! I am writing this post on my Sony UX50 palmtop on a flight somewhere between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Anyway, enough of that, back to what really matters.

As I mentioned I am at the end of a fantastic weekend with some very special friends. Today I was honoured, once again, to officiate at the wedding ceremony of two close friends. This time the two special friends who allowed me the grace of sharing in their special day were Mike and Jane Willis. The day itslef was absolutely perfect in so many ways! The chance to be with friends that I had not been with for almost a year was great. Perfect surroundings! And, the weather was magnificent in Somerset West and Stellenbosch.

The ceremony itself took place in a glorious little chapel in the Stellenbosch vineyards. The little chapel has a wonderful story to it. It was built by the farmer who had hit upon hard times. He did what we all should do in such situations, he came before God in prayer. Apparently, as an act of faith, he promised to build a Chapel for the labourers on his farm to show his devotion and gratitude to God for God's faithfulness. The story ends both with a glorious place in which to worship, and also with a magnificent testimony to God's desire to respond to a call for help with grace and abundance.

In many ways marriage is something like that, in committing to dream in hope of something miraculous and good that is to come. We dig the foundations and commit to the building of something, a place - a sacred space, in which we can encounter the truth of life, the intention of love, and the hope of joy. Marraige is fundamentally a commitment made in faith based on hope, and ultimately realised in love.

The promise itself does not realise the hope, neither does the wonderful act of faith that is reflected in the promise of commitment. What makes the space real, what creates that place of sacred encounter and joyous discovery, is that verb... love. Love is something you build.

Mike and Jane, may you be blessed with the reward you hope for and have faithfully committed to as you build your love in the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years to come.

"These three remain - faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 3:13)

Comments

[Lance Woodruff]

Hello Dion, I'm an American in Bangkok and I've never blogged before. I found you when doing a Google search for Felicity Edwards. As a 20-year-old American student I 'hung out' with the executive committee of the ANC in Dar es Salaam in June-July 1963 and visited Jo-burg in August 1963. I've worked with Bishop Tutu in San Francisco. I started out Methodist, went to Vietnam as a Presbyterian working for American and Canadian churches, became Anglican... My wife is Baptist from Myanmar, where I was teaching last year at a Muslim-managed international school with two Christian on the faculty, me a Bede Grittiths Anglo-Catholic with Buddhist leanings and my colleague a Canadian former rock musician now a minister of the Unification church. I guess the combinations are bizarre, or at least food for thought.
I'd like to talk with you about both Bede Griffiths and Felicity Edwards. I work with government-related mass media in Thailand and my focus is trying to help Buddhists and Muslims understand and refrain from killing one another.
I see you're connected with The Upper Room. I was baptized as an infant (1942) in Windermere Methodist Church, East Cleveland, Ohio, USA. My formerly Quaker grandmother was for half a century a Methodist church bookeeper until age 94 or 95 (she died at age 105).
Two American Methodist journalists 'intoduced' me to Thomas Merton at the WCC's Salvation Today conference in Bangkok in 1972, in a conference at the center where Merton died in 1968.
I work with Africa and Middle Eastern refugees here, but I want to publish an edition of New Vision of Reality that can be a vehicle for Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians here in Southeast Asia to keep channels open ...
Some years ago I wrote a meditation for The Upper Room about holding one's tongue.
In a few hours I'll go to Anglican church here with an Afrikaner Anglican deacon, an Kenyan Oresbyterians, an Australian military attache (last night at dinner before I knew Dion Forster existed we were discussing Breaker Morant)...
I am pleased to read your reflection and admonitions of blessing upon Mike and Jane's marriage...
Lance Woodruff in Bangkok