Our 25th Anniversary Vow Renewal!

A few weeks ago, my husband and I celebrated our 25 Wedding Anniversary!  We can’t believe how quickly the time has gone.  We both felt like it was a significant time to mark and to celebrate.  We’ve weathered a lot in the past year with him recovering from a severe fungal pneumonia, and all the other wild and wonderful things we’ve experienced in 25 years, so for this Anniversary, we decided to renew our Wedding Vows to each other before God, and our friends and family.  

For the invitation, I took this spectacular design from Power Poppy, Hummingbird Paradise, and used the design without the hummingbird in the center.  Because it's a digital design, I was able to stretch it a bit taller to form a 4 3/4 x 6 3/4 inch image to fit two onto a standard piece of XPress It Blending cardstock.  I left the middle open to be able to hand letter in the details, and then the back of the design held the event information (not pictured).   The above version is the colour copy that Marcy allowed me to do so I could print 50 of them.  Colour copying is great, but it just doesn’t capture the true colour as you illustrated it, especially the background, so I hand touched up each invite (I know, crazy!) with Copics as well.  This floral framed style invite is similar to the original wedding invitations we had 25 years ago.  But I do think this version is much prettier :)  

Here are the originals I coloured up before copying.  It was a significant amount of markers, so I didn’t list them,  but I’ll show you some of the close ups of the image.  

All those flowers together make for one beautiful frame.  As you already know, I’m crazy about flowers, and vivid colours so this was exactly what I was looking for.  Two versions of the lettering are shown,  nothing fancy, just a little Signo Multiliner.  

Would you like to see some pictures of our celebration?  We held it at our Church, in the upstairs Chapel.  Originally we got married in our college Chapel, so this was also a nod to our original wedding.  I LOVE the beams we have in the chapel, it’s such a lovely location and feels like a holy space.  The stained glass is from the original Church building exterior wall before we renovated.  We salvaged the special wall, as it was created by a special artisan from overseas.  It’s got a unique 1950’s style.  

These pictures are all courtesy of my beautiful friend Clara at Clara Cecelia Photography.  She is an extremely gifted professional photographer.  She captured so much of what the day meant for us, the people, the flowers, the emotions, our friends and family.  My brother-in-law read our Scripture from our wedding.  

"I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.  And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousnessthat comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.”  Phillipians 1:3 - 6, 9 - 11 NIV.  

We bought all the flowers at Costco and filled them in with flowers from my own garden, including peonies that were from my Grandma’s plant, now transplanted at our home.  My sister-in-law who was visiting from the States did the floral arranging.  

We started with worship with our favourite worship band, which is also our small group.  People we love a lot :)  Two of the songs we did are favourites of ours,  Build My Life, and Rescuer.  

We said our original vows, and then also wrote new vows to each other.  It was incredibly meaningful to both of us.  25 years into this, we know the challenges and joys of what it means to walk out love as a verb to each other.  Never easy, but we never do it alone, and we rely on the Lord’s help to live it out.  I know what love for my husband looks like far deeper now, than when we first started this journey together.  

Our dear friend Sharon, who served with us on staff at our Church until she retired, did our re-marrying.  

Our kids blessed us by sharing what our marriage has meant to them.  And we asked all our guests to commit to holding us to our vows and how we walk them out, and to pray over us.  It was deeply meaningful to us, and everything we had hoped for.  Simple, but full of significance and full of celebration.  

Afterward we celebrated with an ICE CREAM PARTY!  

LOTS of toppings!

Our boys and our nephew did the disshing out.  They had fun.  Three varieties of ice cream, vanilla, Dutch chocolate and Birthday Party (which they re-named wedding party)!

A few shots of our family there.  

My side of the family with my parents, and my brother and sister in law and kids, and our three kids.   

And my husband’s brother who visited from the States for the occasion, sis-in-law and 5 of their kids.  

Joy, friends, family, faith, counting all our blessings together.  Thanks for sharing a little bit of it with us!  

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Our 25th Anniversary Vow Renewal!