Charleston Wedding Pastor

They were young
and from out-of-state.
They called to tell me
“We’d like a Charleston
wedding on the beach.”

The day was set,
A Saturday in July,
we met on Folly Beach
and the rain was falling
down in sheets.

We sloshed through
puddles and soggy sand.
The sea and sky were
an impossible grey
and party-spoiling wet.
We huddled together,
ten of us, sharing um-
brellas. It looked like
a burial at sea.

Then we got invited in.
The owners of a
nearby beach house
saw our plight,
called to us from their porch,
offered us their gazebo
where gratefully
we put down our damp.

It was a wedding
saved by the kindness
of strangers,
a wedding of buffeted pilgrims
taken in. It was a Noah’s Ark
kind of wedding.
The bride and groom, paired and
rescued, spoke their vows big-eyed,
as though on a lifeboat.
And in my book, the Charleston Wedding Pastor’s,
the printing proved indelible. It yet still read: “God provides. God shelters.
God keeps covenant that we might.”