12 days until I get married, and I’m crying like there’s been a death. I guess there has been — a month ago, a close friend: the mother of two people I care about so deeply, who feel like family from another life. Many lives. It’s all tied together — the joy of creating the new with the grief of saying goodbye to the many different blueprints you once imagined would be real.

I’m grateful. But it’s a threshold I didn’t expect.

On Mother’s Day, our pastor Becky brought a word about women. She said that there are promises we need to reclaim and that it’s time to STAND UP in them once again—despite any pain from not seeing them come to pass just yet. Unfulfillment is not “fine.” Illness is not “fine.” Lack is not a bedfellow we can just “live with.” She called for a rise in the spirit. A return to tenaciousness. A return to vigor. To ask, again, the big Asks. To be ready for them in our hearts, minds, and spirits.

My eyes. They wouldn’t stop. Every song… “We are empty that He may fill us; we are homeless without Him…” poured out a new river.

Weddings are happy funerals. Funerals are archways for light.

I am ready for Love to form me. I will walk to the altar, on petals of fire.