Wedding Vows, part II

babe, I remember a couple weeks ago when we were walking from grandmas to seth and kaylas….during our walk i felt the Lord tell me to close my eyes. I heard him say “Do you trust me that i trust him to lead you? to protect you? provide for you? do you trust Him?”

You didn’t notice, but i started crying at the amazing reality that you, tobi feil, are now will be my leader. you are my protector, you are my provider. he trusts you.  

As i was walking with you, i kept wanting to open my eyes and see if i was gonna run into something or trip, but you in those moments held my hand so tight and i knew i was so safe and so secure in your leadership. 

You are so confident in who you are in Jesus. You know that you are a Son of God. You haven’t or will not even think twice about it. and this is why i am head over heels for you Tobi. This is why i am standing before you right now, because you know where u  stand before the Father. It humbles me to be able to call you my husband. Such a incredible gift God has given to me, to live life with a Man who isn’t easily shaken, who listens and obeys to His Fathers voice. I cant wait to see all the nations, all the people we love, all the lives transformed by the leadership of your trust in Jesus. You are the kind of person Jesus’ trusts. 

I just imagine the Father writing out our lives, even before time, and as he was writing this day, i can see him laughing with joy and crying with proud tears at the same time! it overwhelms me that God the Father is in this room now and is completely in love with not just me, or not just you, but us. as us. He has been so faithful to our relationship. He has been the fuel to our faith when we thought we couldn’t love anymore. He has been for us this whole time, never against us! I think the way we are crazy about each other is nothing compared to his beautiful obsession over us. Thank you for always showing me that it was Him who put us and keeps us together. Thank you for challenging me to see him who he truly is. thank you for gently removing the blinders of lies i was believing. Thank you for always encouraging me to encourage. Thank you for being the person who makes me laugh most, the person who frustrates me the most cause your always so nice when I’m a turd. Thanks for being you and only wanting me, no one else but me. 

you are the most courageous man i know. it took such courage and faith for you to believe this really could work out. such faith for us to even stand here this very day and vow our hearts to one another. you are a man of radical faith and simple obedience. 

you’ve won my heart the day that you listened to me for an hour as i ugly cried in front of you. and here we are love, out of all the fights the past couple months, from germany, to israel to america... I cant believe its me who gets to give my heart to you, out of all the amazing women in this world, its me who gets to give my heart away to you. 

you tobias simeon feil, are one of a kind. and your mine.which is my favourite part about you. 

what a life we have ahead of us. 

i promise to always seek Jesus heart and his heart for me first. I will give to you unconditional respect even when i really don’t want to. I will encourage and support your passions, your goals and dreams. I promise to try really hard to listen to you, cause you are worth listening to. I will be there for you  to speak truth over you in times of doubt. I will make you laugh when i know you need to. i vow to be jsut me and fully me and no one else, cause thats all you really want. 

thanks for loving me everyday and in everyday you knew i needed it. 

Wedding Vows, part I

Hi peeps!

We're so sorry for the silence. Jonathan and I headed out to Kona, Hawaii last Wednesday morning and after multiple delays finally arrived late Thursday night. We were invited out to teach on photography, relationships and identity. i.e. So many of our favourite subjects. 

So here we are with a bit over a week left and wanted to give you an update from the island.

We've already had 4 teaching sessions (on photography, portraits, photojournalism and love), with 7 more to go. Weeeeee.

In honour of relationships, we're going to focus on LOVE this week on the blog.

One of our favourite parts of any wedding (besides the bride walking down the aisle or the first look or the general mayhem and joy) is hearing the vows from the couple, specifically when they've written them themselves.

Tobi and Cait are an adorable couple and even though they are so much younger than us, we admire them so much.

I cried in so many places in their vows and was so happy when they said we could share them here. You're in for a treat.

Enjoy!

Cait's vows coming later in the week.

Cait, I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. From the day I first met you until today has been such an amazing journey that is coming to a conclusion today, and still this is only the beginning of far greater things ahead.

I remember seeing you for the first time. The way you were worshipping the Lord, how you talked with me, how we didn’t know at all what was gonna happen now. I didn’t dare think that things would come out this way. I didn’t dare think that a year and a half later, I would be standing here, looking into the beautiful green eyes of the woman that I will spend my life with. I did not dare dream with God. Still, not too long after I spent the first days with you, he awakened my heart to reach beyond what I used to know, to go for new shores in the ocean of life.

What can I say to make known what I feel when I see your face. What could I do to show the world how this lady entangles my heart with hers. I have yet much to learn about vocalizing my feelings for you, and I am not a professional in it. I do not wanna be one anyway. Still, what I can do, is giving you my eternal yes today. Yes and Amen are the words that I will speak towards your heart, from this day forth.

The Lord is showing me more and more of how beautiul you are, and he is enlightening my eyes to see the beauty he has placed within you as I am getting to know your heart.

I love it that you wanna be pretty for me. It shows me that you feel free when you are with me, and I want to learn how to make you feel and become free.

The more I know you, the more I come to realize that I don’t know you at all. I don’t even want to get to the point where I totally understand you, and I never will. As I see how God has fearfully made you, I am learning the fear of the Lord, and the way I can never understand you, I am also realizing how I can never understand him. It is when I glimpse what mystery lies inside your heart that I am awakened to a scent of awe in the presence of the beauty of God.

I feel like a man when I give you flowers. I can’t believe I get to do it for the rest of my life, saying in a creative way what I can’t say with my words. Making your heart hear what only mine can say. I always want to discover new ways to express what you mean to me. I want to write you songs that you will have on your mind when you wake up at night. I want to buy you clothes that make you feel like a princess. I want to be so funny with you that we will have to laugh when we remember our jokes later in awkward situations.

You truly are a the very best gift from the father of lights in whom there is no shadow of turning. He knows my heart, and you are a living proof and a constant reminder that he loves me the way I am, and you even love about me what I don’t love about myself. You love me when I sing the wrong lyrics, when I lose at basketball, when I sleep in for too long and even when I eat too many beans and you have to bear the consequences.

I just feel fully alive when you make food for me. Like that one time when I felt disconnected from you and we only saw each other shortly in the morning, but you chose to love me by bringing me some delicious food. That day is hard to forget, and it shows how blessed of a man I am. The way you care about my needs shows me how you respect me and want to lay down your life for me. It makes me come to the conclusion that I cannot make you do that - I need you to love and respect me unconditionally, and it is totally up to you. I understand how I am not the solution for all of our problems - a sobering realization and a freeing one at the same time.

Cait, Your passion for the Lord is what first drew me towards you, and it is what does now. Your love for him is your love for me, and your respect for him shows the way you respect me. This is why it feels so good to trust you - because I know that you entirely trust him and he feels that same way towards you. I am fully confident to give my life to you today, for I have seen your surrender to him, and you are not holding back. In that sense, giving you my heart means giving my heart to him - once again. This way, I will strive to give my heart to you and to him every day more for the rest of my life.

I promise to be there for you in times of need, stretching out my arm for you on days when you wish things were different.

I promise to laugh with you and to weep with you, riding with you on the joyful waves of life and navigating you through its storms as well.

I promise to be a man, and most importantly, to be your man. I promise not to try to prove it to you, but to trust that you see me the way God meant me.

I promise to be a good husband and father, leading our household in the way God is ordaining me today to do it - seeking your interest above my own, giving up my life to make yours become how the Lord has imagined it from before the foundations of the earth.

I promise to dream with you about life. To believe that everything is possible to him that believeth. To search your heart with you until we find the hidden dreams that God himself has placed there.

I promise to be teachable, holding on to love rather than being right.

I promise to pursue love as my supreme good, and by doing that, to love you in all things. To trust you in all things. To encourage you in all things, and to believe in you in all things.

Ich verspreche, dich so zu lieben wie Christus die Gemeinde geliebt hat, die Liebe die der Vater selbst zu mir hat, dir taeglich weiterzugeben, und dich zu lieben mit meiner Seele, meinem Leben, mit allem was ich bin.

Wie Christus dich ganz kennt, soll meine Lieb dich kennen

Vollkommen in dir bleiben, erfuellen Herz und Sinn

Mein Feuer in der Nacht soll immer fuer dich brennen

So sei dies mein Gelübde, mit allem was ich bin.