Updated: Jamie’s comments in italics
Luke 14:7 When Jesus noticed that all who had come to the dinner were trying to sit in the seats of honor near the head of the table, he gave them this advice: 8 “When you are invited to a wedding feast, don’t sit in the seat of honor. What if someone who is more distinguished than you has also been invited? 9 The host will come and say, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then you will be embarrassed, and you will have to take whatever seat is left at the foot of the table!
10 “Instead, take the lowest place at the foot of the table. Then when your host sees you, he will come and say, ‘Friend, we have a better place for you!’ Then you will be honored in front of all the other guests. 11 For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
12 Then he turned to his host. “When you put on a luncheon or a banquet,” he said, “don’t invite your friends, brothers, relatives, and rich neighbors. For they will invite you back, and that will be your only reward. 13 Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14 Then at the resurrection of the righteous, God will reward you for inviting those who could not repay you.”
When Jamie and I began planning the wedding reception, one thing she thought about was this passage of scripture. She has such a heart for the poor and less fortunate, and really wanted to be able to include them in her plans. This is going to be the biggest party of her life, and she wanted others to be able to come. But there is a big difference between an idea and implementing it. There are practical matters of finding people, transporting them, feeding them, etc. I think this is a time that literally we couldn’t invite the homeless to our wedding reception, but the sentiment of it is still important.
Being a “late bride” (marrying in my late 20s), I’ve had plenty of time to attend other weddings, and think about how I want my wedding to be. I never really decided on what flowers I wanted, or how the centerpieces would look, but I thought about other aspects. How I wanted the ceremony to be a worship service and the reception to be a party, for example. One of the big things I thought about was Jesus’s words in Luke 14:13 “Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” I really didn’t know how it would happen, but I wanted to invite some homeless and downtrodden people to my wedding.
I told Jamie about my experiences cooking dinners at Tallahassee’s Hope Community. This is a complex where people who are homeless are given a place to stay while the reasons for their homelessness are addressed. People don’t come here to live, they stay for awhile until they can get a new start then they move on. Groups from our church have gone and cooked meals for the residents once a month for a few years now. So, in reconciling Jamie’s desire to honor Jesus’s words and my practicality to honor his meaning, I think we’ve found a good compromise.
We are going to take 10% of any money we receive from the wedding and use it to fund meals for the residents of the Hope Community. We have no idea how many meals we’ll be able to cook, but I imagine it’ll be quite a few. On a typical night 50-60 people eat dinner, so I’m hoping we can do a few of these. I don’t want to cook rubber chicken and rice, either. We are going to have a nice meal at our reception, and these people deserve nothing less. The members of our wedding party are going to assist us in cooking and serving the meal, then we’ll sit and eat with the residents. We aren’t going to just cut a check to clear our conscience. We have already been blessed by the generosity of our friends in how they are offering to help for the wedding, and we intend to pass this blessing on to others. Service has been very rewarding and humbling in both of our lives, and our desire is to have an element of service in one of the most important days in our joint lives.
When the planning actually began happening outside of my head, the reality of making something like this happen began to sink in. I didn’t even know any homeless people. It didn’t make sense to just invite some random guy with a sign standing outside my car. I shared my vision and my dream with Drew though, and he was open and listened to me. Then he gently told me what I already knew: It’s not practical.
However, instead of patting me on the head and saying, “You’re so cute for wanting to do that but it’s not happening,” he said, “Let’s talk about this.” We ran through some different ideas of how we could implement the idea in practical ways. Eventually, Hope Community came up, and the idea of providing meals for them came about. I loved that he was willing to come up with an awesome compromise so that I wouldn’t have to compromise my vision for my wedding. I’m excited that we get to do some hands on local mission work. Maybe now I can actually meet some homeless people to invite to my next party.
