A wedding story only God could craft

WORLD reporter Sophia Lee is traveling through Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, and other Southeast Asian countries. She’s sending us regular reports of what she sees, feels, and does—Nellie Bly–style.

SINGAPORE—Last Saturday I watched my primary school best friend Jingwen practically charge down the wedding aisle in mere seconds, so eager was she to be a Mrs. I laughed and then cried to see her radiant smile, and then cried again as I watched her non-Christian family and in-laws listen to a wedding sermon about the infinite, glorious love of God.

Jingwen has been one of my best friends since I was a stranger in a new school. She was the first in my fifth-grade class to speak to me—or, rather, write me, by tossing me a “Welcome!” note with a shy smile. We continued to pass notes almost every class, to the irritation of teachers who just couldn’t keep us apart. Jingwen was also the first friend who accepted my bungling invitation to receive Jesus Christ. The day she repeated the sinner’s prayer after me over the phone, I skipped around the house with uncontrollable glee, imagining the angels in heaven were celebrating with me.

In 2001, I left Singapore with my family for Virginia, where my father planted and led a Chinese immigrant church. In 2008, I came back to Singapore with a mind and body broken and ravaged by anorexia. When Jingwen first saw me, her face crumpled for a second before repositioning into an uncertain smile. We felt like strangers at first. I could barely remember the times when Jingwen and I laughed so hard that I split the side of my uniform skirt. Who was that carefree girl then? I’d lost her—I had even forgotten how to smile.

It seemed that Jingwen had lost her faith and joy, too. As we talked over a meal I pretended to nibble, my childhood friend admitted she had been depressed and wasn’t even sure she was a Christian anymore. “I guess I’m a Buddhist, because my mum is,” she said, which broke my heart, perhaps as much as my illness broke hers.

From then on, we two brokenhearted friends embarked on a long process of mutual healing. I extended my one-month visit to Singapore to a six-month stay with several prayer points: Two of them were to recover from anorexia and to recover Jingwen’s faith. The next several months, we met multiple times a week to share good food and endless conversations, and for the first time in four years, I laughed so much it hurt. Thanks to Jingwen, I started to regain traces of my old personality.

In the meantime, I was praying for Jingwen, and so was my church in Singapore. A few days before it was time to return to Virginia, with me almost 30 pounds healthier, Jingwen finally agreed to visit my church’s community group. Months after I went back to college in Los Angeles, she told me she was getting baptized. Two years later, she told me she thought she had found “The One,” but he wasn’t a believer. Pray for him, she begged, and so we did, and in 2013, he was baptized as the first Christian in his family, just like Jingwen. In 2014, a year after I started working full-time for WORLD, Jingwen sent me a text with long tails of exclamation points: “I’m getting married!!!!!!! Will you be my bridesmaid?!!!!!”

It’s been six years since our reunion of healing and friendship in Singapore, and snapshots of bittersweet memories fluttered in my mind as I rode the cab to Jingwen’s house in the wee hours of her wedding day.

Since bride and groom both come from traditional families, their wedding was full of auspicious Chinese symbols. Like a good teochew bride, Jingwen woke up hours before daybreak, and so did the bridesmaids (called “sisters”), who must accompany the bride all day. Just as the sun started streaming through the windows, the groom and his groomsmen arrived to fetch the bride, carrying a red basket with tangerines (symbolizing abundance and good fortune) and angbaos (red envelopes stuffed with cash—red symbolizes good luck and happiness). But before the bridesmaids unlocked the gates to let the men in, we peeked into the angbaos to make sure the amount of cash matched our reluctance to give our friend away—an amusing tradition called “gate crash.”

Some bridesmaids create elaborate and torturous “gate-crashing” games that the groom must overcome to prove his worthiness, but fortunately for this groom, we were running out of time, so we let him meet and kiss his bride without much hassle. Then we lifted the bride and her poofy skirts into a decorated car and ferried her to the groom’s house. There, the couple paid their respects to the groom’s parents and chewed on glutinous rice balls in sweet dried longan-and-date soup, though they were both too bloated to reflect on the round balls, which represent wholeness and perfection.

Although none of their family members are believers, Jingwen and her husband insisted on having a Christ-centered ceremony. The songs we sang were hymns, most of the volunteers were church brethren, and the minister was the pastor who had baptized them both. One-third of wedding guests were church family who were praying for the couple’s families and friends to one day enjoy the love of God as well. In a way, the couple was declaring to everyone present that their marriage would mark the beginning of a new family tradition.

The wedding was not perfect: There were last-minute scrabbles, an unruly veil, one overblown drama, and a sleep-deprived bridesmaid (me) in a too-short turquoise dress and wobbly heels who marched way too early down the aisle. But I also recognized this wedding as one chapter of a beautiful story that only God could have crafted.