The Wedding the Whole World Was Waiting For

Do you know what it feels like to wait for someone you love?

To press your face against the cold window, breathing little clouds onto the glass, watching the road for the lights that mean they are finally, finally home?

John was waiting like that. Not at a window, but in a vision. God was lifting the curtain and showing John something that was still up ahead, and John watched with all his might.

And then he heard it.

A sound came rolling toward him like nothing he had ever heard, more voices than anyone could ever count. It was the sound of everyone God had ever loved, all singing at once, and it rumbled in John's chest like thunder walking over the hills, like the wide sea throwing itself against the sand.

They were singing because something long-promised had finally come.

"The wedding has come!" they cried. "The wedding has come at last!"

A wedding. All this long while, God had been planning one, the gladdest, biggest party there has ever been. And it was for Jesus. Jesus was the Bridegroom, the one every heart had been aching to see.

And there was a Bride.

She came out shining, dressed in linen clean and bright, soft as the inside of a flower, white as snow no foot has ever stepped in. She was beautiful.

The Bride was his people.

The Bride was everyone who had ever wanted Jesus and let him want them back. All of them, gathered up, made lovely, made his, and not one of them missing.

Somewhere deep inside, in the place where you keep the things you never say, you have wished that someone would choose you. Choose YOU, and nobody instead of you. That you could belong to somebody who would never, ever change his mind.

That wish is a little candle God lit inside you on purpose, and it had been burning toward this very day all along.

Because Jesus looked at his people, the ones he had searched for and bled for and carried home, and his face was the face of a Bridegroom who cannot stop smiling. He had wanted them all along. Through everything. He could not stop loving them.

Long before, at a little wedding in a town called Cana, Jesus filled the jars when the wine ran out, and the best cup of all came last. He has been saving the best for last ever since.

Then an angel leaned close to John and said the gladdest words of all:

"Blessed are the ones invited to the wedding supper."

Invited. Already. Your invitation has already gone out, and the loving has already begun. There is a place set at the long, long table, and a chair pulled out, with a name carved into the back of it.

It is your name.

And Jesus, the Bridegroom, is watching the road the way you watch a window, listening for the sound of you coming home.