Lauri & Mike

Lauri & Mike are one of our engaged couples set to be married in August.
We got to go downtown for one of the nicer winter days I've seen. From looking at their proofs you'd think it was a summer day.
They'd just finished washing the steps at the Old Courthouse Museum, so we took advantage of the wet look. We had a great time.

You know one of the true priviledges of photographing two people just starting out in Love, then getting the chance to watch them make their vows? It's having the chance to see the energy they share for the journey they are about to undertake.
It's like witnessing the metamorphosis of a butterfly. An unexplainable mystery that man in all his glory will never be able to imitate.
They are full of hope for the future, full of potential, and they harbor one more emotion-evoking quality unique to their condition, it's called assumption.

What does that mean?
When we find that one person that we want to spend the rest of our lives with, we naturally form assumptions. We assume that person is going to be there for us. We assume they will always have our best interests at heart. We assume they will Love us as much as we Love them, always and forever. We assume that happily-ever-after is achievable.

Sometimes we struggle as we move through a relationship when what was an assumption fades to what has become our reality. And it's when we realize that assumptions are just a foundation, when we see that in order to survive, Love must ebb and flow from another source, that we really begin to discover life, purpose, and eachother, and what it's really all about.

It means to me that Love has a design. It has a plan. Ingeniously constructed to not just grow us, but to grow us together.
That means then that it also must have a Designer. A Creator.

See, assumptions are great fuel to get us started, enough to get us a few feet off the ground, but Love survives when that hope takes us to heights we never before imagined, not as a result of our perceptions, but because our Designer intended for us to Love as He does.

Corinthians says that Love Rejoices in Truth. How many hear that at these wedding ceremonies but never quite comprehend? How many hear 1 Corinthians 13 and dismiss it so nonchalant as they dismiss the life-giving potency of the Lord's Prayer, simply because our culture has read those words into nothing more than a mere memory verse, something we do at the end of church?

When we take those words off the page and apply them, when assumptions give way to truth, and we're left with one another to either give up or to stand up, and we stand, then Love can and will thrive. It's a promise.

When we accomplish that, we love as He meant us to.

Intimately.

Unconditionally.

What a goal to strive toward! It will never tire for me to be reminded, to look over at the other end of the congregation to my own bride as she's covering another angle with her camera, and meet her eyes, and share that promise, together, every Saturday...