The Royal Wedding: Beauty Because of the Brokenness

That’s right. Beauty because of the brokenness. The thing that I loved most about this wedding is how real it was. I’m not talking about the perfect looking royal wedding on the outside. Yes, if you are looking on the outside and thinking about princes and princesses you can think – oh their life is perfect. But if you look behind her gorgeous dress, the love between them and all those flowers – you see what’s real. Those two came together having had brokenness in their life. He lost his Mom at a young age, so he knows deep loss and heartache. She was divorced, which as much as you might want to say she isn’t good enough for the Royal Family, she’s also known heartbreak. She’s known loss. He’s struggled with mental illness and become an advocate for it. She’s struggled with debilitating migraines. We’ve all watched the hate that has been spread about her in the tabloids from the members of her family, and we all know her Dad didn’t get to walk her down the aisle. 

Beauty Because of the Brokenness.
It wan’t just a beautiful wedding because of her amazing dress or their love, it was beautiful because they are a beautiful couple from the inside out. They are a testament to overcoming struggle and coming out on top. Are they going to last? No one knows. I’m not going to waste my time speculating. What I do know is that I don’t think they’re pretending. I think their love is genuine just by how they demonstrated love.

How different it was from Prince Charles and Princess Di. We didn’t find out until after how much she didn’t feel right about it and neither did he. When you learned about what happened behind the scenes, it didn’t seem that love brought them together so much, but wanting to fit the box – wanting to look the part. That’s not what I saw on Saturday morning.

So, before you think, “I wish I could marry a prince,” think more about how the love you see in them, is the love you have available within you. And the love that Bishop Curry spoke about is available to you if you believe.

He said this, 

“Love is the only way. There’s power in love. Don’t underestimate it. Don’t even over sentimentalize it. There’s power, power in love. If you don’t believe me, think about a time when you first fell in love. The whole world seemed to center around you and your beloved. Well, there’s power, power in love, not just in its romantic forms, but any form, any shape of love.

There’s a certain sense in which when you are loved and you know it, when someone cares for you and you know it, when you love and you show it, it actually feels right. There’s something right about it. And there’s a reason for it. The reason has to do with the source. We were made by a power of love and our lives were meant and are meant to be lived in that love. That’s why we are here. Ultimately the source of love is God himself. The source of all of our lives.

There’s an old medieval poem that says, where true love is found, God himself is there. The New Testament says it this way, beloved, let us love one another because love is of God and those who love are born of God and know God, those who do not love do not know God, why? For God is love. There’s power in love. There’s power in love to help and heal when nothing else can. There’s power in love, to lift up and liberate when nothing else will. There’s power in love to show us the way to live. Set me as a seal on your heart. A seal on your arm. For love, it is strong.”

I have a new sign for my new kitchen I can’t wait to put up, “We love because he first loved us,” from 1 John 4:19.

I hope you can think about this wedding a little differently from reading this. It was magical for ways much deeper than the fact that it was a Royal Wedding.

And one more thing. I was talking to the Pastor who officiated our wedding a few months after at church and remarked how someone came up to him at our wedding and said, “It was good to hear more about Jesus.” That made me so happy, because our wedding was about God’s love more than ours. Watching Meghan and Harry get married made me feel so grateful to not just have the husband that I love, but to know God’s love, and that it’s at the center of our marriage. That is a blessing from God, and I think their wedding confirmed for me how much all of us are loved. 

So, when you see all those pictures from the Royal Wedding, think less about it being how “perfect” their love looks on the outside and more about how what you may have seen was a demonstration of God’s love.  This love is available to you.