It’s such a touching sight, a little 4-year-old boy holding a white satin pillow with lace edging, with two bands of gold atop. He advances down the aisle in his suit and bowtie, bearing the serious demeanor of someone on a most important mission. Everyone smiling, cameras at the ready, and then, ill at ease in his new shoes, he trips, drops the pillow, everyone gasps as the pillow bounces and the two circlets detach from their mooring and roll off under the pews in the candlelit sanctuary.
At another wedding, the moment came for the rings. The officiating pastor (not me, Praise God!) reached down to the ringbearer, untied the ribbon, when a slight, ill-timed, tilting of the pillow knocked the now loose rings free. They dropped, with two quick gutterings, two bright pings, into the large heat grate directly at the pastor’s feet. All breathing ceased for a long second in that room. After the pastor’s shamefaced mea culpa, the wedding party offered two temporary substitutes to allow the ceremony to continue. (the intended rings were later fished out of the grate, cleaned up, and, with some much-relieved joking, placed on the waiting fingers.)
These mishaps and, I’m sure, many others, lead most couples, should they have a ringbearer, to place pseudo rings on the cushions, entrusting the real gold to more secure holding places.
You would think God would choose that reasoning, too, to trust His Gold, His very best, to a secure place, a place of guaranteed safety. But He sent His Son to initiate the prophesied New Covenant (New Testament) with His people but they rejected His Gold, His Own Son! Seeing that the Gift wasn’t safe with them, He expanded the Gift’s offering to others who were not yet His people. To all who accepted the Gift, His Gold, He graciously awarded the right to become His children (adapted from John 1:12), to know forgiveness of their sins, and to be brought out of darkness to experience His marvelous light. Because of that Gold, we non-Jews were accorded the right to God’s mercy and truth, to adoption into God’s family, to receive Salvation in the name of the Gift whose name is Jesus! And all the saints shout: HALLELUJAH! PD
Don graduated from Regent University in 1988 and moved to France for seven years, coming back to the US briefly to marry Sue in 1990. The work in France included working in a Christian School and helping plant a church before returning in 1995. He’s been pastor of Peninsula Vineyard since 1999. He enjoys counseling, especially married couples, traveling back to France (with Sue), reading, doing Sudoku puzzles and sleuthing out good, dark chocolate. Don serves as the senior pastor of the Vineyard Church Peninsula, in Newport News, Virginia.