Sharing a few of my own wedding 2.0 photos on the blog today…
That’s a sentence I never expected to write! As many of you know, Benedikt and I were engaged at the start of 2020 and had a beautiful wedding planned for September of that year to give me plenty of time to wrap up my life here in the States, and move to Gießen, Germany! But, plot twist…
In March of 2020 I flew back to the States to shoot a few more weddings, and Benedikt planned to follow shortly behind me to visit for a few weeks in-between one of his semester breaks. Little did we know, that he would land four hours before President Trump officially closed the board on the EU, and declared our country to be in a National State of Emergency.
I still remember driving to pick him up at the airport and my dad calling me. He said, “Okay Sarah, I need you to put your business cap on, and let your emotions take a back seat because Trump just announced the boarders are closing on the EU so I’m not sure what will happen to Benedikt when he lands…”
I’d like to note that I did not put my “business cap on and cry-prayed the whole way to the airport.”
Thankfully, Benedikt flew through customs like it was nothing, and walked through those international arrival doors with TV screens splattered in “National State of Emergency” announcements.
A few strange weeks of quarantined life with my family followed, but it didn’t take long for us to realize we had some big decisions to make.
Benedikt could either go back to Germany without me, and we step into unknown territory as too if and when we would be able to see each other again, or get married in two weeks. After analyzing all the complexities of immigration processes and legalities (and a fair share of painful tears) we decided on the latter and married May 9, 2020 in a good friend of mines grandparents backyard, with an 80 dollar white dress from Lulus.com and our friends and family in Germany on Zoom.
We always say it was one of the hardest days of our lives, but hands down the best decision of our lives.
At the end of that day we were left with what felt like broken pieces of childhood wedding dreams, my “actual” wedding dress sitting at Rios Tailoring, and a near empty apartment in Dallas that we had only seen over FaceTime.
G.K. Chesterton’s timeless words, “An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered,” have continued to teach me even years after first reading them.
Which is probably why after waiting over a year for Benedikt’s Green Card to finalize, and finally making plans to travel over to Germany with my family to all celebrate our wedding 2.0 together, I felt a little more equipped to handle Germany’s restrictions changing four days before we were supposed to leave. Banning unvaccinated Americans, and only allowing Benedikt and I to go back due to his citizenship, and our marriage. It felt like a familiar inconvenience… I mean, adventure?
We’ve learned how to carry immense joy and immense pain simultaneously in new ways, choosing to focus on the beauty that through each trial we are truly being made more like Christ. And when it comes down to it, that’s all we really want, and it’s all we truly need.
I got to wear my original wedding dress (feat. a sweet tan line), take a few film photos and pass off the camera to others that are near and dear to us to shoot the rest. We got to laugh, cry, eat, sing, and pray- appreciating all the more the gift that it was to simply be together again.
We are so grateful for all the friends and family (present and far away) that have carried us, supported us, and spurred us on toward love and good deeds in the midst of what felt like one of the most insane seasons of life – so far…
