Many a beautiful wedding has had one memorable mistake. Once I was performing a wedding, and just as the groom was placing the ring on the bride’s finger, out of the corner of my left eye I noticed a person rise up from behind the choir railing, light each of the two side candles to the unity candle, and then disappear again behind the choir railing. At the reception, I heard the whole story of what happened from the wedding director.
After the wedding had already begun, the director was horrified to notice that the unity candle had not been prepared. The unity candle is a candelabra with a large center candle and two smaller candles on each side. The custom is for the bride’s mother and groom’s mother to light each of the smaller candles before the service. Then during the wedding, the bride and groom use the two small candles to light the central candle, representing two families becoming one. However, that day they had forgotten to light the two smaller candles before the service began.
The wedding director had little time to decide what to do. Plan A would be to walk up to the candelabra, which was beside the minister, and say to the wedding party, “Excuse me, could you pause right there at ‘for better or worse’ and let me light these candles before things do get worse?” No, she decided that plan A was too much of a distraction.
So she activated plan B.
The wedding director grabbed a candle lighter and ran upstairs looking for an entrance to the choir loft. After wandering into several closets and several wrong turns upstairs at last she found the door to the choir loft and motioned to the photographer. He was sitting on the floor behind the choir railing, taking pictures by a remote control of various cameras that he was monitoring. He was out of view of the congregation, but he was right there on the other side of the choir railing from the unity candle.
The photographer turned white as a sheet when he saw a woman lying on her stomach, peering out of a crack in the door to the choir loft, poking a stick at him. But he caught on quickly. I didn’t even know there was a crisis, but the photographer came to the rescue, just in the nick of time!
God likes to show up just in time. When the Israelites crossed the Jordan River, God waited until their feet were in the water before He opened dry ground before them (Joshua 3:15-16). Even Jesus Himself showed up just in time. The Bible says, “But when the right time came, God sent his
Son, born of a woman...” (Galatians 4:4, New Living Translation). God is always on time; He’s never too early and never too late. Isn’t it time that
you trusted in Him?
(Copyright 2010 by Bob Rogers. E-mail: brogers@fbcrincon.com. Read this column each Friday for a mix of religion and humor. For more “Holy Humor,” go to the Web site of First Baptist Church of Rincon at www.fbcrincon.com)
