If you can see this, read it. My daughter gets married tomorrow, and the day before a wedding has a way of stripping the fake language off a man, so I'm going to say this plainly.
I'm not gaining a son tomorrow. My daughter is getting a husband, and that's not the same thing, no matter how nice it sounds on a card. They aren't becoming an extension of my household or folding into my little kingdom, and my wife and I aren't being crowned patriarch and matriarch over some new branch of the family dynasty. They're starting their own family before God. That's the design, and I had to make peace with it this week.
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." He leaves, she leaves, they cleave, and the two of them become one. That's not poetry, it's architecture. The family was instituted by God: one man, one woman, fruit, a household, a covenant somebody is actually responsible for. Not vibes. Not two grown people playing house while both sets of parents keep a hand on the wheel.
Which is why a wedding is beautiful and also a kind of death. Something has to end. The father's house has to open its hand, the mother's heart has to let go of what it's been carrying for twenty-some years, and a new table gets set that was never there before. Tomorrow that happens in my family, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't cost me something.




