Last time, I wrote about struggling to find God in the storm of wedding prep. I wrote the blog 5 weeks before I published it and it went through several edits before it was ready.

But, much to my surprise, in the last few days, I’ve started to catch glimpses of a stillness and a calmness which has been somewhat lacking over the past little while.

If I’m on that boat I described last time, I can now feel us coming into the harbour.

In the film version of Les Mis, Valjean is helping to pull a massive ship into a dock. The storm is still raging and it’s hard work, but the boat is gradually inching closer and closer to safety. There may well be the potential for small hiccups at this point, but we are now away from the raging, deep sea.

I didn’t expect this feeling to occur. I really just thought the pressure would ramp up and up until the wedding day. But one evening last week we had a mix up about where we ought to be when, and I found myself listening to an hour or so of RSCM music. Even though I had loads to do, taking time to sit and be still together was much more beneficial than crossing things off our To Do lists.

We sat in Church quietly, enjoying the choral music together. Just holding hands, just being. Then this sense of peace crept up on me, minute by minute. Less of the stress, and more of the calm, which reminded me of why we chose to do this together in the first place!

I don’t know how many people experience this, but in the last few days the pressure seems to have relented a little and we have been able to take time to just be in the presence of the other.

We promised a couple of our closest friends that we would take time to chill together before the wedding, but I didn’t appreciate how good this advice was until I accidentally sat and listened to some music with Nathan for an hour.

We have been careful to plan moments in the wedding day where we can just be together, and I’m hoping that these moments will draw us together and give us that peace. We will be praying together, holding hands, before the service, we will be eating on a ‘sweetheart’ table just the two of us, and we will be taking a walk in the grounds together in the afternoon.

By beginng a busy and tiring day by standing (not seeing each other!), praying, holding hands and just being together, I hope that we will still ourselves before we plunge headlong into the wedding and our marriage. This last week has taught me the importance of being still together, and I can’t imagine a better way to spend 5 minutes before we get married!

By eating together, we take some more time to just be together. We can share food and drink and celebrate being married surrounded by our friends and family.

And by heading off for a walk in the quiet, we won’t look back and think ‘We didn’t see much if each other on our wedding day!’.

God has met me in the quiet over the past few days and I can feel myself realigning to him. Not only has he calmed me, but I also feel much closer to Nathan for those times of quietness.

God is the third cord in the stand of our new family. He is in our prayers, our service and our time together. And like I said last time: the rest is just detail.