Take Five: Endless Love

by Margaret Nielsen

 

Any day now we expect to receive an invitation to our youngest son’s wedding. I feel a mixture of happiness, sadness, relief and a certain excitement at the prospect of seeing him officially become a lovely young woman’s husband.

Like lots of today’s weddings, it will not take place in a church. A marriage celebrant in the attractive grounds of a restored Manor will pronounce the happy couple man and wife.

As parents of the groom we do not feel the tension experienced when our daughter was married. We have sailed along, happy in the knowledge that our only responsibilities were to check our wardrobes, buy a gift and attend the ceremony and celebrations.

So you can imagine our surprise when son-to-be-hitched phoned to ask if we’d do a couple of readings on the day.

“What sort of readings?” we asked, thinking we’d have to find appropriate extracts from the Bible.

Son-to-be-hitched vaguely responded with, “Oh, anything suitable.”

As always when we are posed with a problem these days we hit the search button on the Internet.

I entered, “readings weddings” and was completely dumbfounded to find pages of answers.

Apparently readings at weddings are more common than we at first thought.

I printed a few I thought might fill the bill, and the father of the groom happily selected one from Shakespeare and a couple of others written by less known authors.

As is father of the groom’s wont, he highlighted, per favor bright yellow ink pen, his final choice by Laura Hendricks:

“Love is friendship caught fire,
It is quiet mutual confidence,
sharing and forgiving.
It is loyalty through good and bad times.
It settles for less than perfection
and makes allowances for human
weaknesses.

Love is content with the present,
hopes for the future
and does not brood over the past.
It is the day-in and day-out chronicle of
irritations,
problems, compromises, small
disappointments,
big victories and working toward common
goals.

If you have love in your life,
It can make up for a great many things you
lack.
If you do not have it,
no matter what else there is,
It is not enough.
Love will never come to an end
for it is given and sustained by God.”

As I reread these inspiring words, I can’t help drawing a parallel with our marriage of over 40 years. And I suspect my father of the groom thought the same when he chose this particular piece.

I wonder if our son and his wife will do the same in another 40 years. I’d like to think they will.

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Margaret Nielsen is an Australian writer, former teacher, mother of five and grandmother of six. After 45 years living in "bush" towns, Margaret and pharmacist husband Barry retired to the small country community where they met. Margaret is passionate about music, theater and people. E-mail pollyanna@brizcomm.com.au