Big Day Ahead

This afternoon, my husband and I will enter the church where we were married nearly two years ago and baptise our seven month old daughter. It's funny how places can be so nostalgic for people. You see the church where we were married hasn't been a functioning church for quite sometime. In fact, having been sold to the community by the United Church of Canada, all services here require a minister from "outside" to agree to perform our religious ceremonies.

So why not go to another church? Family. Tradition. Nostalgia. My parents were married in this church as was my brother, my aunts and uncles, as well as my cousin. As an adult, I was baptised along with my mother and brother there. Tomorrow, my daughter will join the ranks of the Nevills family who have come to know Christ there along with four of my cousins and an aunt. What will really pull at my heart strings though is the presence of my grandmother who will be brought from her nursing home to the church for the ceremony. My grandfather died when I was a teenager, right before Christmas. He used to take my grandmother to the Christmas service over at the church every year. She would get all dressed up, put on her fur coat, and the two of them would drive over to the church for sermons, candle lit carols, and prayer. Now the year grandpa died, she didn't want to go to church alone because it would have reminded her that after over fifty years of marriage, he was gone. So I volunteered to go with her, initially, just so she wouldn't be alone. But then year after year went by and we continued our christmas eve ritual. She in her fur coat; the two of us trying not to get candle wax on our sleeves. I loved everything about going with her. But last year was different. Grandma decided to move into a retirment home for health reasons. Not long after, a fall put her in the hospital and seriously damaged her already failing mobility. Last year was the first year in fourteen years that Grandma and I did not spend christmas eve together in church. I didn't get to see her looking simply beautiful in her fur coat or stand next to her, my arm in hers, holding a candle in the dark church singing Silent Night. And I deeply missed it. Tomorrow may be the last day my grandmother and I will ever be in this church together.

The church is also important for another reason. At the very front of the church, on a small brass plaque in a stained glass widow, my grandfather's name sits inauspiciously next to my grandmother's. There is no "in memoriam". But we all know this is what it means. And some part of me hopes that God will let him be present in this space for my daughter's baptism tomorrow. The morning of my wedding, I took a few minutes to myself and went over to the cemetery where my grandfather is buried. I cried until my eyes became puffy but I needed him to be included in my day. I remember thinking, as I stood up at the front of the church, how much I wished he could have been there. A few weeks later, I had the most vivid dream about my grandfather. I was moving through every step of my wedding ceremony just as it had happened but when I got to the front of the church, as I looked out over our guests, I saw my grandfather sitting in the front pew smiling. I woke up in tears . . . but when I mulled it over, I felt it was my grandfathers own way of letting me know he had seen me wed. I have absolute faith in life with our Heavenly Father when we die and I thank God that He has given me such riches in family. Tomorrow, my husband and I will ask God to take charge over our daughter and I pray that she will find strength in His word and a light for her path. But I also hope her great grandfather will be sitting in the front pew smiling.