Eight Months Of Thinking About One Saturday

There is a folder in your house that is thicker than anything else you own.

Not a metaphor. An actual folder, or a shared document, or a set of notes that runs to several screens, and it has grown steadily since about January, and there is nothing else in your life with that much attention in it.

Eight months. One Saturday.

And I want to say the first thing carefully, because there is a version of this article that would insult you and I am not writing it.

I am not going to tell you the day does not matter.

You have poured yourself into it and the pouring was not vanity. You are arranging the one occasion in your life where every person who loves you will be in a single room, and you are doing it while working, and most of the people offering you advice about not getting carried away have never had to make two hundred decisions in eight months about anything.

The day matters. It is worth the folder.

What I want to look at is a much narrower thing, and it is not the size of the folder. It is what is not in it.

Because there is nothing in that folder about November.

There is nothing about the ordinary Tuesday in the second year. Nothing about what you two are going to be like when one of you is ill, or when the money is tight, or when you have been in the same small flat for a while and somebody is not talking.

That is not a criticism. Nobody makes a folder about November. But it means that for eight months your entire imaginative attention has gone into one afternoon, and almost none of it has gone into the thing that afternoon opens.

And the day is a door. It is a real door, a good one, worth decorating.

It is not the house.

A marriage in Cana of Galilee

There is a wedding in John, and what is remarkable about it is how it is introduced.

And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there: (John 2:1, King James Version)

There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee.

Notice how little we are told.

We do not know who was getting married. We do not know their names, and they are never mentioned again, and nobody has ever known anything about them. We are not told what anybody wore, how many were there, what it cost, who paid for it, or whether the bride was pleased with how it went.

Not one detail of the arrangements survives, and this is the most famous wedding in history.

And yet the day was real and it mattered enormously. Jesus went. His mother went. His disciples went. That is a household treating a wedding as something worth turning up to, and the whole of what follows happens because they were there enjoying an ordinary celebration that had gone on long enough to run out of wine.

So scripture is doing two things at once with that wedding, and they are the two things you need.

It takes the day completely seriously as an occasion to be present at and enjoyed. And it does not preserve a single detail of the planning.

Both. At the same time. The day is worth attending and nothing about the arrangements was worth writing down.

You are planning something worth attending, and the arrangements have never once been the part that lasted. John 2:1 records the marriage as real and keeps no detail of how it was organized, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman hold a day as good without holding it as everything.

What the folder is quietly doing

Here is the practical part, and it is not about spending less time on it.

The folder has become the place where you and your partner talk.

Think about your last four proper conversations. Not the passing ones. The real ones, where you sat down together and gave each other attention for twenty minutes. I would guess three of the four were about the day, and I would guess that the fourth was about money for the day.

That is what happens, and it happens to almost everybody, and it is not a sign of anything wrong with you.

But it means the two of you have spent eight months practicing being a team that organizes an event, and almost no time practicing being a team that lives a life. Those are different skills and you will need the second one considerably more.

And there is a specific thing that happens afterward if this goes unnoticed. The day comes, it goes, it is wonderful or it is mixed, and then about two weeks later the folder is finished and there is a silence, and neither of you knows quite what to talk about, and both of you privately wonder whether something is wrong.

Nothing is wrong. You have simply run out of the topic that has been standing in for conversation since January.

You are able to practice being a team that lives rather than a team that organizes, and the folder has never once been the same as the marriage. The written word records the wedding as attended and enjoyed rather than as arranged, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the conversation that is not about Saturday.

One sentence about the year after

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately one sentence.

Say one sentence out loud to each other about the year after the wedding.

Not a conversation. Not a planning session, and above all not a new folder, because the instinct when somebody points this out is to open a document called After, and that is the same behavior wearing a different hat.

One sentence each, out loud, tonight.

It should be about something ordinary. Not about goals or where you want to be in five years, which is another kind of planning. Something small and real about being married rather than about getting married.

I want us to still have Sunday mornings like this one. I am looking forward to not being tired. I want to learn to cook properly with you. I think we are going to be all right when it is boring.

And then let it sit. Do not develop it. Do not turn it into a discussion about a house or children or money.

Because what you are doing is not planning your marriage. You are simply pointing your attention, for about forty seconds, at the thing on the other side of the door, so that Saturday stops being the horizon.

That is enough for tonight. It is a small correction to the aim of the two of you, and small corrections made early travel a long way.

You are able to point your attention past Saturday for forty seconds, and it has never once required another plan to do it. John 2:1 puts the wedding inside an ordinary life that went on before and after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when two people say one sentence each about November.