Profoundly Lucky

Saturday afternoon I officiated Elizabeth and Edward’s wedding ceremony at the Myriad Botanical Gardens (Lower East Lake) in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Here are the remarks I shared with them and their guests:

When I was thinking of Elizabeth and Edward, I was reminded of an interesting linguistic quirk in the first creation story in Genesis. The text says, “And God created man (adam is the word in Hebrew) in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created THEM.” Them, not him. So, adam refers to both partners.

The second creation story completes the picture. We are told that God removes not the adam’s rib (that is a mistake in the King James Version), but one of the adam’s sides. He basically split the adam in two.

The ramifications of this story are multiple. First of all, it clarifies that men and women should be treated equally, something we conveniently forgot for most of history. However, and this is why I thought of Elizabeth and Edward, the idea of Adam and Eve coming from one being tells us that seeking out an identical partner would be folly. Adam has his own personality and Eve had her own personality. They were different people.

Elizabeth and Edward are different people. She’s a nurse, he’s an attorney; she’s from Oklahoma, he’s from California; he went to parochial schools, she went to public. And those are all good things, because, if we play our cards right, like Elizabeth and Edward did, our differences have the potential to greatly enrich our relationships.

For that to work, each person has to be comfortable in their own skin, and still have a desire for self-improvement. It’s a delicate but vital balance, and Elizabeth and Edward had and have it. They each had developed themselves into their own independent personalities, before they met each other. Still, they were able to become even better people, through their knowledge of each other, and as their love story progressed.

It is this threading of the needle that has allowed them not only to become even better people, but also provide comfort and support for each other in difficult times. That is why they feel profoundly lucky to have found each other. We should all feel pretty lucky that we get to witness this next step in their relationship.