A wedding homily for Emily Rebecca Bodling and Robert Michael Brock as they are married on 2 September 2012 at the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, Iowa.
Psalm 126:3 "The Lord has done great things for us and we are filled with joy."
Some weeks ago, my mother told a story at the dinner table about my early life, when I would have been about 5 years old, the age of our two flower girls here. I won't bore everybody with the story, but it hinged upon a decision that could have gone one of two ways.
If that one little thing (a very little in the history of the world) had changed, then the whole rest of my life would have diverged from there. I quickly realized that, with the way one thing leads to another, I likely wouldn't have been sitting there listening to that story.
That's the "butterfly effect" that chaos theorists talk about wherein a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the globe, and through a chain of accumulating events that build up and build up, eventually the result is a tornado on the other side of the globe. Or maybe a tornado gets stopped because of the butterfly. It's impossible to tell, really.
That's the effect of little things adding up.
And this psalm verse reminds us that the Lord has done great things for us. Greatest, of course, would be giving us Jesus as our Savior from sin. But He also works other great things in our lives.
So a question: is a wedding a little thing or a great thing?
I believe that what we're doing today, that what God is doing here today, that this wedding is the great thing. It's a great thing resulting from lots and lots of little things that have accumulated over, well, over the whole course of your lifetimes, but also traceable even back centuries.
Start with the night you met. Suppose one of you had decided to stay home that night. A little thing in the grand scheme of history, but had that happened it could mean we aren't standing here today. Or suppose, Emily, you had decided to go to nursing school someplace other than Des Moines, there are lots of nursing schools and you could have picked any of them; or what if you, Rob, had taken a job in Dubuque or someplace else rather than Des Moines. Those would have been little things, really, in the course of human history, but they are part of the sequence of events that brought us here today and are setting the course of your future life.
All these little things in our lives add up to big things. And God calls us, nudges us, pushes us sometimes, even roadblocks us at times, trying to get us to live the lives he would like us to live, making great things happen to and for us. So here we are.
We're participating in a grand thing today that the Lord has done for us. And we are filled with joy.
Where do we go from here? The rest of your life will be made up of lots and lots of little things that will build up to great things in your lives as individuals and your life as a couple.
One thing you should know, Rob, is that Emily is not a glass half full kind of woman. Neither are her siblings. That's not how they were raised. But they aren't glass half empty people either! These kids look at the glass and say "hey, that glass is completely full: half of it has water in it and half of it has air." They tend to look at things creatively. And they know that nature abhors a vacuum.
The glass of your marriage is also completely full, abhorring a vacuum. There's the part of the glass that has the two of you in it. And then there's the other stuff. What will fill the rest of the glass of your marriage? Will it be filled with children? [I've taken a poll among your parents and we would be in favor of that, but it's not our decision, so we'll let it go at that.] Will it be filled with stuff like kitchen gadgets and Vikings paraphernalia? Or kitchen gadgets emblazoned with Vikings logos? Will your marriage glass be filled with experiences? Or with dead air? It will be filled with something. Your new job as a married couple is to see that the glass of your marriage is filled with good things, with proper things, with unifying things, with helpful things. All the little things, all the little flaps of a butterfly wing, that God uses in creating a great thing that fills us with joy.
When we talked a while back you spoke of a married couple you both kind of admire, a couple you look to as a successful pair [And talk about pressure on the rest of us! I'm not sharing the names of the role models, so all of us married couples are on notice to be on our best behavior, especially when Rob and Emily are around]. I counseled you then to keep an eye on that couple -- and on others, too -- to see if you can figure out why their marriage seems to work, and maybe why some others seem not so happy. Watching other people handling stress and joy and challenges and blessings, watching all those little things will add to your total experience of life, guiding and challenging and drawing and cautioning you.
And remember that there are lots and lots of ways to handle similar situations. Some are definitely poor or destructive ways to deal with stresses or blessings. But among the good ways you'll observe, remember that you can use them as examples, or hints, or suggestions and see if they work with your personality, temperament, your tempo, and your budget. Some will work for you; some won't. You two will look at things differently from other couples.
And this is important: you are also going to look at things differently from each other at times. When you do, remember that here, too, an awful lots of things aren't necessarily right or wrong. For example, who washes the supper dishes? Does the toilet paper come off the top or the bottom of the roll? Is the toothpaste tube supposed to be squeezed only from the bottom or can it be squeezed from the middle? What goes at the top of the Christmas tree, a star or an angel?
I believe the right way to answer those vexing questions of married life is sort of like looking at the glass as completely full. What I mean is that there's usually another way, a middle way, a creative, fully and mutually satisfying compromise way that can turn a problem area upside down and actually, really bring joy where there may have been tension.
Little things can peck away at a marriage, but don't you let them. See that other little things add up together to a great thing that the Lord will do for you. The Lord has already done great things for us, and today we all join you in being really, really filled with joy.
Amen.