One of the lessons we taught our son and his fiancée during their wedding preparations was the need to spend more time preparing for their marriage than they did preparing for their wedding day.
A wedding lasts a day; a marriage lasts a lifetime. It’s very easy, in any stage of preparation for any event, to get lost in the detail; you can’t see the wood for the trees at times. Attention to detail matters enormously when you’re planning anything, but must never become the end in itself. We had debates over which font to use in the order of service booklet, which songs to sing during the ceremony, which shade of pink the bridesmaids’ dresses had to be. All of those things are important, but at the end of the day, they’re probably not the things which will be remembered in years to come! What matters more than a ‘perfect day’ is a marriage grounded in God and ruled by love.
It’s easy also in church life to be distracted by the details. Often, these details are important matters that do have to be sorted, but we must never become bogged down in the detail. Nothing matters more than God; nothing must come before God. Nothing must take the place of the love we first had for God (see Rev 2:4). If we speak in tongues and have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and have all knowledge, if we have enormous faith and endless generosity but lack love, we gain nothing. (1 Cor 13:1-3)
God calls us to wholehearted devotion and a lifetime of surrender. We have to keep the bigger picture always in view; we have to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, not allowing ourselves to become too settled in this world, for we are only pilgrims travelling through (see Matt 6:33, 1 Pet 2:10-12, Heb 11:9). Our preparations for that wonderful wedding must never be so focussed on a tiny detail that we fail to keep our end goal in sight.