Garden Party for Birthday Girl

It worked this year. We had Ann's June birthday lunch out in the garden. Last year we tried but had to move inside when the rain came.

We've had many birthday parties up at camp. But since the inception of the backyard garden we've transferred the venue to 42's backyard. And yesterday was a perfect day amist the flowers, food and friends.

We're so glad we have one birthday in June. The peonies were in their glory and the one white rose bush was full of blooms. The garden has really filled in these past two years. Hostas are bigger, iris's are fuller and I have inserted white alliums to add to the height of the garden in early spring.

And this year, as with other years, we had two additional guests. Rachael and Elizabeth.

I was reflecting on that this morning out in my garden room, about my friends, my garden and the wedding we had here two years ago, and I came across a wedding sermon from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Here is one little segment which I thought was good.

" Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy ordinance, through which he wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to his glory, and calls into his kingdom. In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marrige is more than something personal-it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man. As you first gave the ring to one another and have now received it a second time from the hand of the pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above man, so high are the sancity, the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sancity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love."