Remnant Fellowship Weddings – Beautiful Observations from One of our Teenagers

Here in the Remnant Fellowship, God is consistently, faithfully, beautifully showing us the array of GIFTS that He has given to the Saints…and those gifts are on display in every age group and across geographical boundaries! We have the opportunity on this website – remnantnews.com – to share updates, happenings, perspective, and interesting tidbits of information about what is going on in the Remnant. Today, we are featuring an article written by one of our TEENAGERS – Maddie Kurtz. Maddie is the 16-year old daughter of John and Jean Kurtz, who have been members of this Church since 2001. And as you will read for yourself, she has quite the gift for expressing herself through writing. We ALL marvel at the Spirit-leading and beauty of our REMNANT WEDDINGS, and in this piece, Maddie shares her praises to God and observations of these grand events from the perspective of a teenager. May we all count our blessings for the gift of GETTING to be a part of such a wonderful, life-changing message and Church!

Ten Observations on Remnant Weddings from a 16-Year-Old

By Maddie Kurtz

I am no stranger to Weddings. One thing that always seems to bring about puzzled expressions among my peers at school is how often I state my endeavors over the weekend involve nuptials. Most kids my age have maybe been to one or two Weddings, mostly because a family member or someone was getting hitched. To make a rough “guesstimate,” I have attended about 70+ Weddings in my meager sixteen years on this planet. I guess that’s just another thing that makes us Remnant kids different. While most people find Weddings to be as rare as purple pandas and only see a marriage every once in a blue moon, we see them on practically a weekly basis. One of our more recent Weddings, that of Anthony Ruberto and Makenzie Hayden, followed in the thread of out-of-this-world, beautiful Remnant Covenant Weddings, and so after that Wedding I decided to make a list of ten amazing things about getting married in the Remnant…in order from little bits of awesomeness to life-changing, extraordinary miracles.

1. At a Remnant Wedding, Everybody Helps Decorate! Seriously, no joke! My mom and I went in at 9:30 Saturday morning because we got an e-mail that there would be a workday to get everything together, and there were at least a hundred people there. Everyone had a job, be it running to grab candles from the basement or tying little coffee filters to the “Huppah” to make it look like a blanket of flowers. The entire building was a hive of activity! Nowhere in the world are you going to get that many people to help decorate for free. And that segues into Awesome Thing #2…
2. The Decorations are Out of this World! Everything is gorgeous at a Remnant Wedding, perfect and beautiful down to the minutest detail. You’d think after more than 80 Weddings they’d start to look the same, but no! Every single aspect is unique and different, one Wedding to the next, each featuring the Spirit’s leading…and displaying the individual tastes and personality of each couple and making it fantastic.
3. The Food is Totally, Crazy Good! Where else can you feed 1,000 people the most amazing food in the world, and everyone stays within the boundaries of hunger and fullness? I had to stare a couple minutes at this amazing little cookie that looked like a perfect pink rose and was one of hundreds on the dessert table. It was perfect and beautiful, a work of art that I almost felt ashamed to eat and I wondered how on earth the food committee was able to make them all so perfect without the help of a Star Trek Replicator. But I didn’t see anyone shoveling 40 cookies into their mouths, despite how tasty they were. Thanks to this message, I could eat half a tasty little rose cookie, enjoy it, and have no pull to eat the other half. Only here!
4. Fireworks! Every Remnant Wedding ends with the bride and groom racing off into the night in a convertible, first running through the crowd of sparklers that shine like burning stars, and then driving off through the magnificent explosion of fireworks. Mr. Greg Watson has always put on a show that puts any other to shame, each time showing up every paltry bicentennial spectacle with the awesomeness of Remnant firework shows.
5. The Reception is to Die for! Nowhere, I mean, NOWHERE, is there a party like a Remnant Party! I don’t know about you, but it is truly an amazing thing to witness 500 people line dance in perfect rhythm. Anywhere else, you’d be hard-pressed to find a reception in which people are doing anything else but sitting around and playing Angry Birds or something. Here, it’s a party that leaves all the others in the dust.
6. The Dancing is Pure and Fun! In the world, partying and dancing isn’t really all that fun. I’ve been to Freshman Formal and I can tell you, everybody’s so wrapped up in looking good to the other guys and girls and worrying that their “friends” will think they are acting stupid that enjoying a fun dance becomes a highly stressful calculation of looking cool to your peers, rather than worshiping God through joyful dance. Here, we all jump and do the Robot in complete safety, not worrying about others judging us or calling us weird. Everybody’s friends with everybody and everybody is just friends. There’s no need to add an oil drum of awkward to a situation with flirting here. It’s just about fellowship with your brothers and sisters in Christ.
7. You Don’t Have to Worry About all that Dating Stuff! Weddings always provide the prime example of why it’s all so much better to wait for God to give romance. Here in the Remnant, us teens get to see the product of having a pure and Godly life and staying under authority. We watch the older kids we admire have these totally awesome, fairy tale Weddings, all because they stayed with this message and put these teachings into practice. It’s a powerful example to us kids, who see the blessing we can get for obedience and not awakening love until God gives it to us.
8. The Couple is Beautiful Inside and Out! You see the bride walk down the aisle, dressed in her long white gown. The couple exchanges their heartfelt, personally written vows with each other (not just some bland words but powerful and profoundly genuine promises from the heart). They make a covenant promise to love God first and foremost and to uphold each other’s arms and serve the Kingdom. It is amazing and inspiring and beautiful to watch two people say things like that, to do things like that. They put God before everything else and they shine! They honestly shine!
9. You Get to Hear an Amazing Covenant Charge! Quite possibly the best part of every Wedding is hearing Mrs. Gwen Shamblin get up on stage and teach. Every sermon, every message is something that hits my heart in a way that makes me want to give every part of myself to God. Hearing her talk about love, covenant, and commitment, all through the example of Jesus Christ, is absolutely amazing. How she showed us how to love like God loves…it’s amazing.
10. God is the Center of Everything! Probably the biggest thing that distinguishes a Remnant Wedding from any other in the world is that it isn’t really about the bride and groom, the dancing, the decorations, or the food. It isn’t about the dresses or even the fellowship. In the end, it’s about praising God and worshiping His Name. It’s about striving to get out of yourself and serving God and His Kingdom…and your brothers and sisters in Christ. God is the center of a Remnant Wedding, and it couldn’t happen any other way.

In conclusion, I may be just a teenager, but there really is something fantastic about how we celebrate a marriage. We value Weddings because in the Remnant, marriage is something beautiful. If God ever blesses me to let me have a Wedding, I’d hope to put Him first in every detail, just like all the ones before. Praise God for allowing us to witness such beautiful, holy covenant ceremonies!