I’ve been telling people all week how weird it is – you plan and plan (and by plan, I mean you watch and listen to your friend plan and plan) and then suddenly, you’re there in the day – you’re living and watching and breathing the moments that you’ll remember for years to come – and then poof!, it’s over.  The wedding and merriement that followed were filled with things that every wedding should: dancing with every ounce of your being, laughing under the dark and open sky, cheers-ing people you really really love, seeing faces and hugging necks that don’t fill your day-to-day life anymore and stolen stares at the bride so that you remember just exactly how she looked when you tell her children years from now when they ask.

In my maid of honor speech, I shared a quote from Shauna Niequist’s Cold Tangerines and thought I’d leave it here, too. Alexis is and has always shown me the bigger, more beautiful picture of life – she is an absolute gift from God in my life and it is a joy to live life with her, not to mention stand with her on this page-turning day.

“True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and it happens when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into the broken, fragile parts of ourselves. We have to give something up in order to get friendship like that. We have to give up our need to be perceived as perfect. We have to give up our ability to control what people think of us. We have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they’ll leave. But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship gives us….We were made to represent the love of God in each other’s lives, so that each person we walk through life with has a more profound sense of God’s love for them…When we do the hard, intimate work of friendship, we bring a little more of the divine into daily life. We get to remind one another about the bigger, more beautiful picture that we can’t always see from where we are.” – Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines