the wedding countdown
In the morning, after Riley pads downstairs with the edges of her pajama bottoms dragging the floor, pooling just slightly around her bare feet, she pauses, just out of sight in front of her desk. I don’t have to look to know that even as the sleep still clings to her eyes, she’s flipping over a happy number on her wedding countdown. That wedding countdown, with its arbitrary hundreds bordered in romantic roses, brightly proclaiming days till we say ‘I do,’ with a stapler-turned-paperweight jammed through its thick cardboard middle to make it stand, gets packed in suitcases and overnight bags, perched on window sills and book shelves, and even placed right smack in the middle of the kitchen table where ever Riley travels, so each day can begin with her soft-whispering hope into the newness of the morning. Riley quite literally lives hope.
For Riley, calendars and countdowns, which may once in her childhood with Autism have only served to dispel a desperate rigidness to routine and anxiety about the unknown, have now in her young adulthood become the currency of hope, that active waiting that finds its full assurance in faith.
I hear her feet lightly tapping now against the floor in front of her desk, where, when she’s home, the countdown always sits poised, drawn right up to the very edge, the edge of the desk, the edge of the day. She whispers, her voice like a prayer, making a recitation to herself about time coming, even though the wedding date hasn’t yet been set. It doesn’t matter, really, how far away the wedding still may be, only that as of today, she’s one day closer and still believing. The day she got the countdown, we had only flipped it as far into the future as it would go. So often, living hope points just that way, across an immeasurable distance, to a destination somewhere well off the edges of any map.
Lately, God has been inviting me to live hope, which, according to the New Testament Greek, isn’t merely a special feeling or a dream, but is instead about intentionally waiting-in-anticipation for God to accomplish what He has planned. I hope in the steadfast love of God, in His promise that He’s making all things new, in an indestructible life forever with Him, in the wedding supper of the Lamb, and He is teaching me as we go that hope with faith cares little about how anything seems or how long it will take. He invites me to hope and hope and hope, and then to start hoping all over again. He invites me to live hoping in a living hope. The writer of Hebrews, in writing about the faith that delights God, wrote of people who died still believing, without seeing the fulfillment of the promises in which they hoped, but having seen them and greeted them from afar. No matter how far off the fulfillment of God’s promises may yet be, hope in Him never puts me to shame, but instead, as the prophet Isaiah once said, those who wait for God will renew their strength, eventually gaining an everlasting life.
I listen to Riley now and wonder what living hope looks like for me, if there could be some way to begin with hope in front of me every morning, to literally use my body to acknowledge it, and then, to carry it with me as I go.
“Now what are y’all thinking as far as the wedding date goes?” My sister Camille asked recently, one night a few weeks ago when we parents sat cozy in their living room, stuffed to the brim with Ray’s good cooking.
We call these our think tank nights, as Ray first dubbed them, when Kevin and I sit down with Camille and Ray, Riley’s Mom and Dad B, her “parents-in-love,” as she loves to tell anyone listening, and we all assess where we are as a family and where we still need to go together. The four of us have been walking our unconventional young couple through all kinds of preparatory milestones and are committed to do so until we all believe they’re ready for marriage.
Camille and Ray had spied the wedding countdown on a family trip they all (including Riley) had taken over Thanksgiving and had wondered exactly what Riley was counting down to, since they knew we’d yet to actually set the date.
We laughed that night, the sound like easy grace filling the room, because the countdown seems to just appear, hanging out with knick-knacks and collectibles or amid the family pictures like it’s always been there, so natural and unassuming that we all have at times mislabeled it as belonging to other people’s homes and things. Once, on a trip to visit Zoe in Boone, I found myself peering at the countdown over a steamy coffee mug in the bleary waking hour, having spotted it carefully nestled into the entertainment center in the living room. I tried (and failed) to place it into the context of Zoe’s or her roommate’s lives, vaguely wondering, sitting there without my glasses, what it even could be, until, on closer inspection, I recognized it and its cheerful purpose.
“I said, ‘Who does that belong to,’” Camille had said through a broad smile, recounting her own similar story, “and Ray said, ‘Well, that’s Riley’s.’ All that time, I thought it belonged to his sister.”
“Well, don’t think that number is a commitment to any specific timeline,” Kevin explained, still laughing, “because she knows it’ll have to be adjusted when we know the actual wedding date.” As a numbers guy, Kevin has always felt pressured by the specificity of the countdown, especially given the wealth of what we don’t yet know about the future.
This is something we’ve explained and that Riley not only understands but accepts, that we’re waiting until she and Josh accomplish certain shared goals before we determine when their wedding can happen, and yet the practice of waiting, that fully engaged anticipation of the fulfillment of a promise, matters to her, even if the arrival at 0 days only means a reset to another arbitrary point in the future.
The conversation on our think tank night had me recognizing that my own hope could become a testimony if I approach it with the kind of Riley-level practice that, in its matter-of-fact observance, inevitably draws the curiosity of others. That way that she hopes, that she lives out hope, it testifies to me and to everyone in her family, even to Josh, who will often ask her how many days remain on that wedding countdown.
“436 more days,” she says now, a little louder, her voice carrying, as though the acknowledgment of her hope really does energize her, waking her up to face today, even though right now, that means 436 more days to hope and to keep on hoping, anticipating, with joy, the promise of their future.
