and the bride wore a dress her mother made for her. Out of deference for the occasion she took out her five eye-brow peircings, but left in her nostril stud. I wouldn't have cared at all about the eyebrow things. I was worried about what would fall out of the top of her dress. The dress was (I'm guessing here) 36C and she was easily 42D. It's a number I'm familiar with. That they were nicely decorated with tasteful tattoos didn't bother me, either. I just wanted them to stay put.

I met the step-dad of the groom on the front step as I entered the house of the folks who would be his new in-laws of sorts. He is an elder at my church, and his wife, the groom's mother is a deacon. He had been the person in charge of keeping the groom occupied today, so that he wouldn't keep driving everyone crazy asking, "What time is it? Can I put on my uniform now?"

The room in which this all took place was filled with fairies and wizards and Buddhas (oh my!), but also with colorful folk art from around the world. The bride had just returned from a "last family vacation" to Peru with her parents and little sister on Wednesday. Everybody was still jet-lagged and dealing with altitude changes.

I asked the bride, two weeks ago when she and the groom sat on the sofa in my study at church,"You know there will be Jesus in the ceremony, right? That I don't do civil ceremonies?" "I don't mind." she answered. Not the answer I was hoping for, but I'll take it, I thought to myself.

The wedding was a favor to the groom's mother. When I arrived at St. Stoic almost two years ago and started getting requests immediately for use of our sanctuary as a "wedding rental chapel" I begged the session to help me develop a wedding policy so that there would be some boundaries on how this was done. Essentially I wrote the policy, and they approved it, after I defended a few intricacies, such as the type of music that was appropriate, and that I would not allow the table or font to be removed from the sanctuary just because "They wouldn't be needed that day".

But, as it turned out, for my very first wedding ever, I broke quite a few of my own guidelines. The ceremony did not take place in the church, so it wasn't those kind of guidelines that came into question. My own rule that I broke was this: the amount of pre-marital counseling that I required. They got very little. Practically none.

This will sound very peculiar indeed when you learn that the bride and groom were ninteen years old each. They were in quite a hurry to get married but not for the reason you are imagining. The groom will leave the country for the very first time ever on April 19th. He's going to Kuwait, as a newly activated member of the National Guard.

So, I did this as a favor to the groom's mother. She called a few weeks ago, and was very upset because the kids were determined to do this, and were going to go to a Justice of the Peace. She wanted this to be done by somebody who cared about her kid, cared about whether he lived or died, somebody who would check in on his young bride from time to time, somebody who cared. Since I do care, she asked me to do the ceremony. I debated for as long as I could. In the end, I decided that good pastoral care of the family meant that I should probably do this for them, and to try to make it as meaningful as any other wedding.

I discovered that I needed to be careful about to whom in my "real life" I told this story. One colleague called me out as someone who would break her ordination vows if I went through this. In her opinion, absolutely no earthly good will come of these two kids getting married. In fact, I am clogging up the court systems with another needless divorce by doing this. Note to self: "Be more discriminating in what I tell this person."

The young couple has a very hard 18 months to face. That there is some committment to face these hardships together can't be all bad. She can become part of a community of military spouses and is eligible for some support through the military that she wasn't eligible for yesterday. If it helps him and is a comfort to him in his active duty to think of his bride waiting for him instead of his girlfriend, who am I to say that they shouldn't get married?

The rest I am willing to leave in God's hands.