Number 2: Rehearsing

It's 1:11 AM and I'm beat.

We've just returned from the rehearsal dinner. So beautiful: the food, the home (a restored historic home), the friends, the words, the table settings, the calligraphied placecards. Oy! But tomorrow is the rehearsal, Sunday the wedding. I'm sorry I haven't been able to interact more with the comments. I'm barely eeking these entries out. I should be in bed. But I'm doing it half as an act of discipleship, half as a gift to my future self standing on the other side of this mysterious, utterly other wall called Marriage.

As I was thinking about our rehearsal dinner, though, I got to wondering about this thing we do quite often but perhaps don't actually notice: rehearsing. Preachers rehearse sermons. I've acted plenty and rehearsed lines up to a hundred times just to get them right. We rehearse the consumation of Christ's Kingdom in the Lord's Supper. Athletes and dancers rehearse their routines before performance.

But what trips me up is this feeling that the actual event comes and goes so quickly that I'm left disappointed, even upset.

All this rehearsing happens, then the event, boom, comes and goes, and is gone. My disappointment kicks in either because all my faculties are not properly engaged--and so I'm reduced to living a partly distracted, instead of savorful life--or because I'm thinking about the event wrongly. For now I'll say it's probably both.

So as I ground my way through another day of to-do lists I kept offering little prayers to God. God, help me figure this out. How should I be thinking about it? And He did help me, in a manner of speaking. The insight given was this: the rehearsing is the good stuff too. And then the lightning bolt struck. "So thaaaaat's what people mean when they say cliches like it's all about the process, not just the product." It's really true.

Phaedra and I and all our friends and family are rehearsing tomorrow afternoon so we know where to stand, what to say, when, how and why. We really do want a smooth-flowing ceremony. And the ceremony matters--a lot. Those vows are there for a purpose. Events matter. Products matter.

But I need to keep reminding myself that rehearsing isn't half-living, it too is full-living. In a sense, then, I don't have to rehearse, I get to rehearse.

And maybe even better: a really great human life is not one expunged of rehearsing, a really great human life is one that is full of rehearsing. The media can trick me into thinking otherwise, with its finely polished final products. But balderdash on that. I need to keep resisting that way of seeing my life.

So the Gospel for me tonight is that Phaedra and I will get to rehearse a whole bunch of stuff the rest of our life and that will be the good life too. And so be it.