Wedding Dresses...

I am a whore I do I confess, but you are like a wedding dress… I am a prodigal with no way home but you are like a ring of gold. So could you love this bastard child…?

While Derek Webb writes a compelling song about our relationship with Christ, I have another perspective on this chorus. Yes, we are the bride of Christ and the wedding dress is a sign of purity – purity earned not our choices, rather by His. We (women) don it once in our lives in theory; however, as Christians we seem to don it continually, we’ve stashed it in our spiritual closet to be taken out continually when it suits us. True it is our nature – prone to wander, prone to leave the Lord we love (Come Thou Fount). Is there any way to progress to the point where we can leave the dress and the honeymoon phase and move onwards? In doing so, stopping the cycle as Shane Claiborne calls it, being born again, again and again and so on.

This question of the dress has plagued me as of late in my discussions regarding is significance when it comes to brides and their obsessions with all things wedding. While I have no intention of being married at this stage in my life, I am to be a maid of honour and as such have entered the realm of all things Martha Stewart and Vera Wang. The bride is planning on trashing her dress as symbolic release of all the burdens that come with planning the “perfect day.” As she’s realized there is no such thing, nor should there be such an expectation, so she’s getting rid of the dress right out of the gate, and focusing on the marriage.

As Christians is there some way we can trash our dresses? Can we remove the dress or dresses that hang in our spiritual closets whether they’ve been worn thousands of times – now dim with use or still rarely used? And how do we address the issue that we use these dresses as a repetitive safety net? In that in donning our dresses again are we trying to recapture the feelings that come with that rush down the isle – the newness of the dress – the vows, the commitment and yet ignoring the marriage part. We know He’ll always be at the end of the isle regardless of the number of times we leave him after the honeymoon. He still loves us – like some kind of puppy, He’s always their waiting. Harsh I know but is that how we view Him? Maybe that’s unfair but I believe we have a lot in common with the plague that is affecting our marrying peers – it’s all about the flash and bang and little about the words that leave our mouths – to have and to hold from this day forward, in sickness and in health… I will submit etc.