I Loved Her First

You all know by now I'm a sucker for weddings. All weddings. But I'm especially sucked in with weddings of my former students and exponentially sucked in when they ask me to perform the ceremony.

It happened again yesterday, this time with a different set of glasses on.

Yes, she was beautiful.

Yes, the mom cried and dad shed a tear or two.

Yes, the ceremony had it's funny moments that you can't predict exactly when or where but they all happen.

There wasn't much different from pretty much all the other weddings we all go to. The couple did their own vows, washed each other's feet, mixed sand instead of a unity candle...but at the end of the day the end result was the same. They kissed. They were announced. The people clapped. Lots of photos were snapped. Yada yada yada.

The reception was nice, too. Good food and good friends. The people that make up my church family have been doing things like this a good deal over the years and we've gotten pretty good at it, too. We've done a lot of life together after a decade and occasions like this are pretty fun for all of us.

But one word of advice to dads with teenage daughters:

Don't sit at the same table together while the bride dances with her father and chooses that hokey country song "I Loved Her First."

That silence you heard from our table's Dads-With-Teen-Daughters Club was caused by the lumps in our throats.

That lump in our throats was caused by the chilling reality that went completely down our spinal columns from the whispering echo in our brains that said:

"You know, it really won't be all that long before you'll be having that dance with YOUR daughters."

And, all of a sudden, that song didn't seem that hokey--but eerily matter-of-fact.