Notice: The subject matter of this blog entry may need to be interpreted by parents for younger audiences.

I've finished the course.

Tonight was the rehearsal & dinner. Great fun. Made a complete cool dude of myself as per usual & Amanda bailed me out. Got to take my bride home, and the drive ended most well.

(Side note: We missed you tonight, DV, but we understand, really. I'll have something for you in 2010.)

Tomorrow is my wedding day.

Tomorrow is my wedding day, and I, like my bride, will be wearing white.

Last year, before my iPod docking station broke, I was listening to my iPod on shuffle, and I couldn't help but remark at the number of abstinence message songs. Not just "Average Girl" by Barlow Girl, but "Wait for Me" by Rebecca St. James, and even "The Love He Has for You" by Point of Grace and "I Don't Want It" by the late great dc Talk. When I encountered these songs on their respective CD's (Barlow Girl, Transform, The Whole Truth, Free At Last), I was of the mindset that these messages, like all of the "True Love Waits" messages that graced my ears in youth group & conferences & retreats, just weren't intended for me. I thought: I'm not in any kind of physical relationship; I don't have anything that sniffs of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. Why do they feel compelled to drill this into my skull?

Note to future youth ministers: I'm pretty sure I'm the exception, not the rule. I don't think I'm a wholly isolated case, though.

Fast forward 12 years, and the situation changed. The first 27½ years of my life confronted me with no temptation to break the promise made back in high school. I'd always joked that I'd like to think I'd met who it was I was going to marry. In May 2008, I discovered I met her in 2001, and the subsequent 13 months were a very different story. There is a lot of truth to Genesis 2:24. Over the process of a relationship developing into wedlock, there is a lot of bonding that takes place. You can assume I've been sappy or not, but it's the truth. I'm attached emotionally to Amanda, at a very deep level. Her successes are my successes. Her trials are my trials. I devote, even lay down, my life for my wife, and I know she would do the same for me.

And now, looking back, I am so, so very happy to not have bonded physically with anyone else. To have done so would have twisted my heart in that I couldn't cleanly bond with my wife, in the way I have bonded with her emotionally and still do spiritually.

I am also glad I have waited until after our wedding to bond physically with her. Even if nothing else deviated from courses taken, tomorrow night, and every night thereafter, would have been greeted with a lingering doubt "Would she have still said "Yes" if I didn't give in?".

True Love Waits. It is not impossible for it to wait: my bride & I are proof tomorrow that it can wait, because it has waited for both of us.

Tomorrow is my wedding day, and we both will be wearing white.

-KIE