Celebrating a wedding as the world burns

When I started telling people about my engagement to Derek, all that joy felt out of place. The start of 2026 was a precarious time. It seemed as if every month, Meghan and I were editing a news story on a country Trump had threatened or invaded. Several international friends made plans to travel to our wedding from Europe and then cancelled them due to global uncertainty and rising fuel prices.

“It feels right and yet so strange to celebrate a wedding when the world is upside down,” I texted a friend. “It’s a strange dissonance, huh?” she replied. “Personal joy while the world burns.”

How could we celebrate something so joyful when so many people were living in apprehension? How could we dare to declare something new – to put our time and money there and ask our loved ones to do the same – when it seemed wiser to buckle down before a storm?

Suffering with Christ

I grew up believing that God’s will would be accomplished in my life, irrespective of my wishes or feelings. Maybe CC readers can tell me if I’m right in guessing that this is part of my generation’s inheritance from our immigrant families. “God’s will” makes sense of unthinkable losses: famine, war, betrayal in communities, the rupture of emigration and challenges in a new country – the isolating grief of death, miscarriage, illness and financial struggles.

I had the added examples, as a missionary kid, of modern martyr stories. Suffering, I believed, was a pathway to being a fully realized human – God eclipses you in his story.

But while suffering forms us, joy does as well. And being fully formed in God isn’t just about his distant glory, but about becoming our real and beloved selves. One of my teachers in Uganda, “Uncle Jonnes,” read Psalm 23 and boomed: “Imagine your enemies! Imagine them around you, and you are sitting down to eat.” And then he pantomimed pushing up his sleeves and tucking into a good piece of chicken. That was 2015, and I couldn’t imagine it yet. But the image stuck.

I could see that my belief that God was waiting to harm me or those I loved – and that other people would eventually disappoint me – was a flawed system. If in Christ all things are created and all things hold together, then the blueprint for our world is generosity. It is more-than-enough. Everything that falls short of that is an aberration, not the norm.

I wasn’t sure then how to live with generosity as my default assumption of God and others, but I have spent the last decade trying.

‘Don’t be afraid of its plenty’

Derek’s and my first date was in the Pacific Spirit forest along Vancouver’s shoreline – we squinted into an August setting sun and decided that we wanted to be in a relationship. Later, holding hands and walking back to the car, I quoted (badly) Mary Oliver’s poem that begins with rumours of war and ends – “don’t be afraid / of its plenty. Joy is not meant to be a crumb.”

Over the next two years that sense of more-than-we-ever-expected joy kept expanding: in the bright green moss of Pacific forests during dark months; in our spontaneous sightings of orcas and encounters with grouse and black bears; in the long conversations we had each evening over the phone; in sharing communion and evening complines; in the welcome our respective families showed. “Everyone should be this lucky!” we kept saying. After years of believing that God desired my joy I was experiencing it in a new way.

And, despite my caution in sharing it with friends, they responded with an answering joy. One writer friend in the States, a gentle soul who told me her writing had become mostly political “rant,” wrote: “ENJOY every moment, every eruption of laughter, every pinprick of light. I am drinking in your joy!!!!”

When I wrote news stories on the Ebola epidemic in Congo for CC in June, I interviewed people who belonged to my family’s wider network – which meant that, as we talked about deaths of their friends and colleagues, they were also cheering for my wedding and teasing me about how many goats Derek would give my father. They gave me messages to pass along to Derek, welcoming him as an in-law. It is always a good time to grow your family.

Abundance

In the end, every part of our wedding day rang with generosity and joy. I’m not sure Derek or I have found the words for it yet.

All of the flowers for our wedding were grown by a church friend of my sister-in-law. We found 15 pre-picked buckets of zinnias cooling in her home – she had traded with her gardening friends, she told me, to get every colour, and then welcomed us to bend over her dahlias and baby’s breath and calendula and eucalyptus and asparagus (yes, really!). We took away two carloads of flowers, and her prayer of thanks for God’s “bounty,” in flowers and love.

CC was mentioned in many speeches: Derek and I met because of the community in these pages, and were married at Swallowfield Farm four years after I met Jenny and Dennis deGroot at Swallowfield to interview them for CC.

A thing leads to a thing, leads to a friendship, leads to the family expanding. A single conversation, a single article, leads to a new introduction, a widening circle. We live in a time of strange dissonance, but joy is not meant to be a crumb. Joy is a feast and the table is set under the well-laden pear trees.

A friend of mine from university led a blessing ceremony before the wedding. I was surrounded by women from different parts of my life; each read a blessing over the life I was beginning with Derek. Minutes before I walked down the grassy aisle between Jenny’s teenager-tall sunflowers, the group shouted in unison: “Be this day one of joy, and the life that follows it even more joyful!”