The Best Wedding Ceremony Job

It's almost July, which means you are most likely knee deep in wedding season. There are bridal showers, bachelorette parties, gifts to purchase, dresses to buy, shoes to coordinate, travel plans to make, dates to find, dance moves to perfect. But don't let these things bog you down, weddings can be a lot of fun!

Admittedly, my zeal doesn't always make it all the way through the wedding season. When the first wedding hits in March or April, I am one of the most helpful people you will ever know: setting up, cleaning afterwards, whatever it takes. I will have spent months thinking about the perfect gift for the happy couple and how to package it just right so as to impress everyone whose eyes behold my beautiful creation. It will have taken me a week to craft the perfect words to express how happy I am for the bride and groom on the card. During the ceremony and reception I will snap a hundred pictures of the experience to make sure I remember it all.

By the time I make it to the last wedding of the year in September or October, I will pick up a gift card 10 minutes before the ceremony starts, write the card in the car and finish it during the ceremony. If I remember to pull my phone out, I might take a picture of the ceremony and although I'm really happy for you, I'm more concerned about eating your food and guessing what dessert you will be serving. This does not mean I'm any less excited for you than the people that got married in the spring, but your wedding is the 10th I've been to this year and I only have so many dance moves left in me (granted, I really only had 3 bad ones to begin with).

Despite the waning of my enthusiasm as the season wears on, I am always excited to do a reading at a wedding. Last summer, one of my former roommates got married to a great guy and they asked me to read a Scripture during the ceremony. I think this might be one of my favorite jobs in a wedding for the following reasons:

- If you like being in front of people, you get to come up in the middle of the ceremony and do your thing, but you don't have to stand there the whole time with the risk of forgetting to keep those knees loose and bent and going down in the middle of the ceremony. You also don't have to walk up and down the aisle in high heels while everyone watches you, anticipating your tripping and falling so they can post it on YouTube.

- You don't have to purchase a bridesmaid dress, rent a tux or buy a suit.

- You still get to be a part of your close friends' big day and you get to go to the rehearsal dinner - free food!

- However, I did discover one drawback at this particular wedding. I happened to be standing and chatting with the wedding party when the DJ announced dinner was ready. I tried to back away slowly, when the bride's father insisted that I was a part of the wedding party and I should go ahead in the dinner line. At first, this was great because I got to hold it over my friends' heads that I got my food before them. This greatness lasted the amount of time it took to get through the buffet line, as I found myself in a room alone, eating my dinner by myself as all my friends were in the food line together.

If you find yourself with the honored job of reading a Scripture (or a poem, song lyrics, an excerpt from Dr. Suess, etc.), there are a few things you can do to get yourself ready. I sent the following email to the bride (my former roommate) a few days before the wedding to assure her I was preparing myself for the role she had given me on her special day.

As the wedding day approached, three things happened: 1. The officiant was going to assign me the Scripture to read and had not done so as of the day before the wedding. 2. The bride was slightly afraid that the officiant just wasn't going to show up on the wedding day (it seems like all brides find at least one irrational fear for their big day and this was hers). We joked that since I am a licensed pastor, I would be the "back-up". 3. the "back-up" officiant idea quickly turned into the bride and I discussing how "great" it would be if I just hijacked the mic from the officiant and took over the ceremony. With that understanding, glean what you will from my preparation and this email. Maybe you can use this as a template to make sure your bride knows you are fully prepared to play your role. Enjoy the wedding season!


Hi (insert your bride's name here),

I thought I would fill you in on my weekend activities:

1. I practiced photo bombing as many photos as I could get into this weekend at Riverfront Park.

2. I read the entire Bible out loud, I think I'm ready now.

3. I practiced stealing the mic on Sunday at church. It was a little difficult since they use the kind that go over your ear and tape to your cheek. I might need to go to church with you guys for a couple of weeks until the whole situation blows over.

4. I am prepared to hit the officiant with my Bible while shouting, "I'm a better pastor anyways! I'll pick my own scripture!"

I can't wait to celebrate with you!

Misadventures in Food: Coriander

My mom is awesome - I am grateful to have been so lucky to end up with her as my mom. There is one thing my mom did not teach me growing up: how to cook. I am not betraying her by telling you this, she knows it (and all the amazing things she has done for me have more than made up for this oversight). So I have been trying to pick up this coking thing over the past couple of years. The English muffin pizzas and Costco frozen dinners I made in college are no longer cutting it.

Turns out cooking is pretty fun! However, like many things I attempt, stuff tends to go wrong the first time I try them out. In fact, they go wrong often enough that I hope to share them with you for your enjoyment and maybe you'll learn a thing or two with me:

Recently, I decided to try a new recipe this week for a Tahini Avocado Chickpea Salad from Ohsheglows.com (one of my favorite recipe blogs). The main part of this salad is the dressing, so I took a lot of care during it's preparation, even triple checking to make sure that I had done it right. I kept tasting it and thinking something was off, so I kept adding things to it to fix it. I just could not get it right, so I checked the recipe again and I hadn't forgot anything. I decided that I must just be tired of tahini since I had it in my lunch two days in a row (by the way, tahini is pureed sesame seeds if you didn't know - I had to look it up the first time I came across it). I was doubly disappointed because the recipe had avocado in it and I have yet to find a recipe I didn't like with avocado - this was devastating!

My solution was to bring it to my co-worker in hopes that she would enjoy it and it would just confirm that I had too much tahini for one week. She tried it and immediately realized something was missing, so we went on a quest to figure out what the problem was. We looked up the recipe again and went through it step by step only to find out I had done everything right. I started looking through the pictures posted of the process where I discovered that the coriander I used looked different than the blogger's which prompted me to asked this question to my co-worker: "Uhhhhh...soooooo...are you like supposed to...ummm...are you supposed to crush coriander when you use it?" I was relieved when she did not know the answer right away, so I wasn't a total idiot. After a few minutes of Internet research , it was confirmed that you cannot just throw whole coriander seeds in a food processor and expect it to come out delicious.

I encourage to try out the delicious salad, but only after you read the link about using coriander. :)

Misadventures in Food Scale: Worth a 2nd Try Due to Chef's Ignorance

Adage #24: Lists are your friend.

As you might have guessed based on past posts, I love making lists. it's more than love, it's really a compulsion. So I have made a list of some of my favorite lists:

1. Things to never ever do in the video cafe again.

I mentioned this list in another post a while ago. During my first year of leading youth ministry at my current church, I took part in a 30 Hour Famine. The leaders collectively decided the best way to start the event involved herding all the students into our multi-purpose room (aka the video cafe), turning all the lights out, playing some loud music and bursting in with silly string. Sounds fun right? It was. Until we spent an hour sweeping and mopping the silly string off of the floor. This was the the event that started our list. For years we kept a mental list of materials we had used in the video cafe that made a giant mess or had backfired on us. We finally wrote it down and framed it and when we moved buildings, we immortalized it on the floor underneath the carpet in the auditorium. The best part of this list is referencing it when we hear of some other youth ministry using one of these items and making a mess, it's a little like an "I-told-you-so" moment.

Our list as immortalized on the auditorium floor.

2. Top ten favorite people in the world.

When my fellow youth ministry worker, Buz, realized my unhealthy love for lists, it could only go downhill from there. Buz challenged me to come up with a list of my ten favorite people in the world. I couldn't just brush it off and joke around about it. No, instead I spent weeks perfected it. I think it ended up taking me a month to report back to him with my final list. Before I finished the list, there were weekly discussions about who had made the cut so far and how I had four people I wanted to fit into two spots. It was rough. You probably want to know who's on the list, right? I can't remember who's on it. And you would be correct in assuming while writing that last sentence I am now trying to make up a new list in my head.

3. My to-do lists.

Yes, that's right it's plural because I have to-do lists everywhere. They are on my desk at work, they are on my phone, they are sticky notes by my bed, they are at the bottom of my purse and they are on the whiteboard calendar in my room. It's a disease, really.

4. Random youth ministry lists.

Along the same time Buz challenged me to come up with a list of my top ten favorite people, we also started making all sorts of ridiculous youth ministry lists. It was like the baseball stats of youth ministry: favorite message series during the spring, favorite events on a rainy Saturday afternoon, top ten Doug Field's resources used in a year ending in an odd number, etc.

My favorite list was of the people who had been in youth ministry the longest - it was topped by five leaders who had been involved in the ministry for a minimum of 7 years. These five people chose to stay involved in one ministry long enough to see the students they started with graduate from high school and often even longer than that.

Within the past year, all five people on the list have stepped out of youth ministry. What I love about this list is that these 5 people might not be doing youth ministry on a weekly basis any longer, but I know that they are all still involved in lives of young people (some who have graduated from our youth ministry) and more importantly, they are dedicated to the gospel. They understand that stepping away from a ministry program does not mean stepping away from ministry itself, whether they find that in volunteering in a different ministry, being actively involved in their neighborhood or whatever else God has called them to do. It's okay to be so committed to something that it feels weird when you miss a week of youth group. It's also okay to step away to do something else God has opened the door to. 

What kind of lists do you make? When was the last time you stayed with a commitment for 7 years? Is there something you need to commit to? Or is there something you need to be willing to walk away from?

Adage #15: If the shoe fits, wear it.

I love shoes, I'm convinced they can fix emotional problems (while simultaneously creating physical ones due to bad foot support). When I'm at the store and every pair of pants I try on don't fit, I can always count on shoes. I read in a Relevant magazine article a while ago that suggested one thing you should be able to do by the time you are 25 was to learn how to walk in heels. I took this information to heart and began my journey to better looking fashion and more uncomfortable shoes. If you are a female and are not already able to walk in a pair of heels without looking like a drunken monkey, here are a few reasons I think you should learn this life skill:

1. If you have a low pain tolerance, this is a great way to work on building that up. Wear your heels on your next trip to Disneyland or do laps around your neighborhood and soon you will be able to tolerate any sort of pain. You could probably win on Fear Factor after that kind of training.

2. Apparently, wearing heels makes you look more "professional", so if you are interviewing for a job, I would highly recommend you wear those heels instead of your running shoes.

3. Celebrities are people, too. And celebrities are always wearing heels - I'm pretty sure they wear them when they are asleep. When we wear heels it allows us to get into their world a little bit, feel what they feel and all that. We can either sympathize with how tough their life is (being followed by the paparazzi, hours of boring awards ceremonies, no privacy, etc.) or we can feel glamorous just like them by wearing our expensive Jimmy Choos (read: wearing the heels I bought at Target on clearance).

4. Maybe you need to come to terms that you are short and this is the best solution you have besides surrounding yourself with only short people. Not that this is a terrible idea, but I feel like there are a lot of great tall people in the world and it would be sad to miss out on those friendships just because you feel short when you stand next to them.

I hope I have convinced you. Or maybe really I'm just trying to psych myself into taking off these flats and putting on my super cute Jessica Simpson nude wedges.Happy shoe shopping!