The Wedding Anniversary

Our Wedding Day, September 19, 2009

Every year my husband and I forget our anniversary. I am not a big fan of showing love on scheduled days, and prefer random acts of love and generosity throughout the year to these scheduled days. If my husband only thinks to get me a card and say I love you because it's an anniversary, we have a problem, ya know?

(Oooh, as I write this, there's another lesson I can hear. Can you also?)

So, the other day I was thinking of why we always forget our anniversary. We married on September 19, 2009, so easily I could list back-to-school craziness as one such reason. Also, my husband inevitably goes off to Man Camp that time of year, and surely, there are a thousand other less obvious reasons.

Now that we celebrate the Feasts, I am aware of three big feasts in the fall, starting in September, so I decided to consider whether these days interfere with me remembering our anniversary or if they possibly could help me remember. I know Feast of Trumpets or Rosh Hashanah comes first in September, followed by Yom Kippur and Feast of Tabernacles, I decided to start with Trumpets and looked up the date it came the year we married.

I typed in "Feast of Trumpets 2009" in my iPhone and was completely stunned when I saw our anniversary date appear. We married on Feast of Trumpets that year. Now at quick glance, who cares!? Except that when I first became interested in the feasts I learned that Feast of Trumpets is absolutely filled with wedding symbolism! In light of that, how exciting that we celebrated our wedding on Feast of Trumpets! If only, we'd had a trumpet at our ceremony! I digress.


First, I should say that I think it is very very likely that the rapture will occur on the Feast of Trumpets or Rosh Hashanah. For one thing, a "nickname" for this feast is "No Man Knows the Day or the Hour." For another thing, it is known as Coronation Day, when the King would be crowned. Also, Jesus often referred to His church as His bride and uses traditional Jewish language when he says "No man knows the day or the hour, Only the Father in Heaven." In Jewish tradition, only the Father of the groom would know when the wedding would occur because he'd be preparing the bridal chamber, and only he knew when it would be finished. "He goes and prepares a place for us..." Just as the groom will come to take his bride, Jesus will come for His bride, "like a thief in the night." Yes, there are many verses that could lead us to believe that this Feast will be the time of the rapture. It helps that the spring feasts were all fulfilled with their prophetic significance on the exact day of the feast. Jesus the Lamb was slain for us on Passover; we were sealed and had the law written on our hearts on Pentecost, and so forth.

But back to the wedding. Jewish weddings are beautiful. I attended one as a teenager, back when I didn't really even much care about any of this and certainly did not pay attention to the significance of things, but I recall the Chuppah and it was beautiful. So, when I married, I wanted one too. I asked my (then) fiance to build me one of birch trees, drape it with sheer fabric and decorate it with roses and sunflowers. It was beautiful! We stood under this Chuppah and said our vows, joined our lives together in covenant love.

Jesus came and already wrote the Ketubah, the marriage contract, on our hearts and in His own blood. We are betrothed to Him. Now, we await His return for His bride, the church. He will come as a thief in the night, when the Father tells Him all the preparations are complete. He will take us to the Chuppah in the sky, give us robes of white and we'll be His.

I am so honored that we accidentally married on the Feast of Trumpets and that even without knowing it we included some components of the Feast for our guests. Our anniversary is September 19th on the Julian calendar, but even if we forget September 19th every year as it comes around, I know we can celebrate our anniversary on Feast of Trumpets, a day of blowing trumpets in remembrance of something that is yet to come... our wedding day with Jesus.