Me (roughly preschool-aged, but not officiating a wedding) and my brother (pre- preschool-aged and not officiating a wedding)
Welcome to Random Explanations, in which I try to explain a matter, answer a question, or concoct a theory based on a suggestion. This week: that time I officiated a wedding in preschool.
I don't know how this came up, but yesterday in Sunday school I made a side comment about how I wasn't yet ordained. In the middle of this spiel, I said: "I've never officiated a wedding. Actually, I have. It was in preschool." And then after some fumbling, I tried to contribute to the actual topic at hand.
My wife EA wanted me to expand on this clerical chapter of my life a bit more for this week's Random Explanation. It's a quick story, but here it goes.
To the best of my memory, one of our teachers at Riverland Hills Baptist Church preschool was getting married. So someone decided that the preschool would put on a play of sorts to celebrate this person's impending nuptials (a word that has always sounded a little wrong to me). The idea was to get all of us three and four year olds to act out a wedding: bride, groom, wedding party, the whole shebang. And I was tapped to serve as the minister.
It sounds really bizarre, I know, and I'll admit that I wonder sometimes if I have imagined the whole thing. But what kind of person imagines this scenario? (Maybe you shouldn't answer that) But it happened. I do not remember much about the "ceremony" except that all our parents attended, I wore a pinned black robe that was possibly my dad's, and I lip-synced my part to a tape recording of a minister presiding over someone's wedding. I'm pretty sure there was cake afterwards.
I'm 99.99% sure that this wedding was not legally binding. The last 0.01% comes from a part of me that likes to believe that I actually married fellow preschoolers at the age of four. I can see the Huffington Post headline: "YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE WHO PRESIDED OVER THEIR MARRIAGE!" I really would like to know what happened to the bride and groom and if their faux-union had any impact on relationships in the future. Did they like each other in the first place? Did they think they were actually married? Did they date on down the line? Was there an awkward conversation where one of them said, "I met someone else"?
Thinking back to this, I realize that I have presided over a fake wedding and, thanks to a baptism lab in seminary, performed a fake baptism (the water and person was real, but the individual being immersed had already been baptized). This means that I am a fake funeral away from completing the fake minister triumvirate. I am a little ashamed to admit that possibility intrigues me.
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