Meeting with the Minister

One of the hardest parts of planning out our wedding has been our geographical situation. We're 2,700 miles from her family in Pennsylvania, 2,500 miles from my family in Tennessee, and 3,000 miles from Disney World. Fortunately, planning a Disney wedding makes that a little easier, since they handle a lot of the details for flowers, food, and so forth. However, this also has the side effect of leaving us feeling a little bit like we're on the outside of our own wedding. Early on, when discussing who would officiate the wedding, I suggested one of my friends and coworkers, a former minister and a really great, charismatic, and funny guy. We agreed that by having him perform the wedding it would give us a chance to at least have some direct control over one part of the wedding. With our friend as the officiant, we can at least rely on having a wedding ceremony that we had a hand in crafting.

Nothing was off the table. Nothing.

We first met with our officiant months ago, back before Christmas, shortly after he agreed to officiate the wedding. Fortunately, James has some experience officiating weddings and has done so in the past, so he was able to sketch out a basic outline of the wedding with us. Girl Scout Fiancée had also done a good amount of research on wedding ceremonies, even going so far as to check a book out at the library (a book which we soon came to own once late fees transformed into us simply buying the book from the library). Our first short meeting took place over lunch on a weekday, and we went over the basic outline, identified the places where Girl Scout Fiancée and I would need to make some decisions, and bounced a few of our own ideas off of James. We also discussed travel arrangements (we felt it only fair to fly James to Florida and put him up at the Boardwalk for a couple of nights as thanks for officiating our wedding) and ended with some homework for Girl Scout Fiancée and I to take care of over next few months.

I actually had a really hard time articulating what I wanted out of the wedding ceremony, specifically James's role; for some reason, my words failed me. After a while, I finally managed to distill it down to something comprehensible: since we live so far from our families, we wanted James to be the part of our wedding ceremony that represents our lives in Seattle. We've been together for over seven years, all of but six months of which was spent living together in Seattle. Our lives have taken us far from our friends and family, and at the wedding we're going to be surrounded by our loved ones, but will be far away from the home and friends we've come to know over the better part of a decade. I want James to represent our lives in Seattle, since he's come to know us over the last several years, and to communicate to our families the kind of life we've built together. Despite being tongue-tied at the time, I think I managed to get across to James what I wanted.

I rarely have this much trouble communicating.

Through the new year and well into February, Girl Scout Fiancée would spend a few minutes every now and then discussing the ceremony in general terms. One night we would talk about our vows, and another about the order in which we wanted the ceremony to proceed. Girl Scout Fiancée found an awesome reading, and I found a few bible verses I wanted to consider using, but everything was just kind of a jumble of ideas stolen from other weddings. Eventually, we set up a meeting with James again so we could build out a more formal outline of the wedding. Of course, this meant Girl Scout Fiancée and I needed to actually make some decisions about what we wanted, and we went into the next meeting with James with a far more solid plan.

We met with James again at Azteca (a Mexican restaurant chain) to discuss the ceremony. Now that we are closer to the wedding, we also had quite a bit more information from Disney about how the day of the wedding is going to go. Armed with our Frankenstein's monster of a ceremony outline, printouts of the readings we were considering, and a more solid day-of schedule from Disney, we met again to go over everything. James had some great advice on ordering all of the various pieces, and seemed comfortable with the sections of the ceremony where we want him to speak in his own words a bit. It was during this meeting that it really became clear for me that while I'm excited about how unique and personal our wedding ceremony is going to be, there are a few parts that I want to be more traditional. I want to say, "I do" at some point. I want the exchange of the rings to be a little more traditional. I'm not sure why. The world may never know.

Maybe not quite this traditional.

Regardless, we've built out our ceremony, given the information to James, and now he's working on his portions. I think our families are really going to like the ceremony, because so much of it comes from us (yes, we stole a lot of ideas from the Internet, but we worked everything over to make sure that it fit us). It's not going to be a long ceremony (for which I'm sure everyone is thankful), and it's going to be a nice mix of traditional, unique, and whimsical, which I think fits the ideas that Girl Scout Fiancée and I have had for our Disney wedding as a whole.