Ask Me I Dare You: Part 2

We’re off to quite a rousing start to the answers of Ask Me I Dare You! It was so much fun I’ll just dive into the second question earlier than planned, asked here by Jon Trouten (whose wedding I recently attended in Iowa and has written a guest blog for me and it’s one of the most read posts we’ve had):

“Here’s my nosey question that I keep forgetting to ask you 🙂

You’ve officiated at the weddings of three friends. You wrote earlier that those will be the only weddings that you’ll ever officiate at. Why is that?”

This answer is actually pretty simple:

Officiating a wedding is the most pressure filled thing I have ever done in my life, and it ruins the whole wedding experience for me. I’ve decided I would much rather just go to a wedding and enjoy the heck out of it than to put myself through the terror leading up to the wedding, and the almost unbearable nerves during the wedding. I feel like this because weddings are a huge deal, and if the officiate screws it up, even for one second, it ruins the one day, one moment that both of those people have waited for their entire lives! On top of that, I only agreed to marry three very close friends to me because I refuse to ever perform a “cookie cutter” wedding. I want my sermons and stories in those weddings to not only be legitimately personal (I’m talking about going 3 for 3 in bringing the place to tears!), but I want to literally be vested in their lives forever. And the nice thing is that since I don’t work for a church, I am not forced to perform any weddings. I’m done. It was a great ride, but I want nothing more to do with officiating them.

Oh, ok, here’s the controversial part to why as well—I don’t believe that pastors should have legal rights to marry people on behalf of the State: The State should be the ones to give the legal rights that come with marriage. My belief is that unless a person works for the State in some legal capacity, it shouldn’t count as legally official. This is where the “separation” between Church and State gets all convoluted. I will be doing a three part series on gay marriage and Church/State coming up pretty soon, so I’ll stop there for now. Just know that I’m estatic to never have to feel that pressure of marrying someone again. So don’t ask me to marry you! I won’t do it! 🙂

The one other thing, the three that I did perform were cool enough to last a lifetime. The 1^st wedding I did was in a Chateau in Southern France (picture below)

The 2^nd wedding I did was on the ocean (picture below)

And the 3^rd wedding I did was in a nationally historic church (picture below)

Much love.