Acting as a Bride to Christ

While going about my chores today while my baby slept, I was thinking about my wedding day and the preparations for becoming a bride.  The night before I washed up thoroughly, and then my friends and I had a nail painting party. The next morning, I ironed my dress.  My Mom did my hair in a simple fashion that my husband loved. I put on my best jewelry. I prepared myself to be pretty and look nice for what is known as “the most important day in a girl’s life.” But it hadn’t just started there.  The wedding preparations went back for months.  My Mom and I made bridesmaid dresses and groomsmen vests. With friends we made all of the wedding party outfits, and all of the decorations, invitations, brochures, etc. But the biggest project of all was making my wedding dress.  We picked the whitest satin we could find.  When we first used the wedding dress pattern, we made a sample dress out of sheets.  We worked to get that dress perfect. 

Courtesy Missy Photos

Knowing the lengths we went through, I am sure you can imagine my horror one day when I was sewing and I rubbed that brilliant, pure white satin wrong on my sewing machine.  Looking down I saw two dark, glaring grease spots.  They were tiny in comparison to the full dress – but they were ugly and huge.  I was terrified that after months of working on it, I had ruined my wedding dress.  (While this is not my point in this article, if that ever happens to you, try rubbing it out with a tiny bit of baby shampoo.  It worked to COMPLETELY get the grease stains out!)  That one event made me think long and hard though of something besides my wedding to my husband.

Courtesy Missy Photos

 My thoughts were these. We are the bride of Christ.  As the bride of my husband, I wanted to be “spotless” and beautiful.  I wanted to be pure for him when I married him.  Those two little grease spots in my white wedding dress caused me so much concern even though the rest of my dress (all 99.9999% of it) was still a brilliant white.  As a Christian, I know I often do something and think “That wasn’t THAT bad. I’ll not worry about it.  The rest is okay!” But Christ wants us to be as attentive a bride to Him as we are to our husbands.  He wants us to look for those small, but dark and glaring, blemishes and work to remove them from our lives.  It’s all about becoming more Christ-like…  It’s hard to do, but it is necessary and pleasing to Him!  We’ll never be perfect.  We will always sin.  But part of being a Christian is working to do what is right and pleasing to Him.  We want Him to look at us and find us a pleasing bride…just as we wanted our husbands to on our wedding day.

Courtesy Missy Photos