I performed a wedding for our next-door neighbors.
They are a younger couple, he once-divorced, she not previously married.
They are great people, Mighty Alright in their open-heartedness and fun-loving natures.
When they discovered that I "had been" a minister (ministers never lose their ordinations unless they are stripped of them for some major infraction), they insisted that I marry them.
I considered this to be a great honor and privilege.
Having been an immigrant from New Mexico to Virginia (...
but was I legal or illegal? Never mind.
It's alright), I was unfamiliar with Virginia law regarding marriage.
I had performed many marriages in other parts of the country, and had never had significant difficulties with the law.
This time my luck ran out.
In Virginia, if you are a minister wishing to marry a couple, you must be "registered" with the state.
To achieve that status, you must go before a judge, in court, and prove that you have a congregation and aren't just claiming to be a real minister.
How the state got into the business of determining what constitutes being a real minister, I do not know.
Remember that little thing in the constitution about separation of church and state? They evidently don't.
But that's alright.
Every time the tree of liberty has a limb chopped off, another one grows.
So I went back to my wonderful neighbors and told them that, as an inactive minister without a congregation, any marriage I performed would not be recognized by the state of Virginia as valid.
We brainstormed how to get around this.
It was late in the evening, and the juice of the grape had run freely, so some of our solutions were very creative and disrespectful of state's rights.
The solution they came up with was to still have me officiate at the wedding, and to have a 'legal' ceremony without guests before a justice of the peace.
Forward to the wedding day.
I put on my robes and went to the appointed beautiful spot on a beautiful lake.
The service was short and sweet, co-designed with the married couple, and then we all repaired to the large tent for the reception.
By "luck of the empty chairs" -- the only empty chairs in the place -- my wife and I ended up sitting at a table with the father of the bride and his wife, the bride's stepmother.
During a lull in the festivities, dad leaned over and said to me, "So what church do you belong to? I hear rumors that you aren't a minister in a real church.
" Arriving at this point having been jerked around by the state of Virginia, I was short on patience with questions of this nature.
I was, however, determined not to cause a scene, and tried to politely evade the probes.
The bride was over thirty, and could wisely make her own choices, and I did not think it was appropriate for her dad to be trying to second-guess her in the matter of her choice of ministers.
Finally, when he would not stop, I leaned over and said, "The Church of the Mighty Alrightness.
" He turned purple and became speechless.
I quite enjoyed that, to tell you the truth.
So I encourage you not to let anyone else define what is "real" for you.
Because what is real for you is the core of your sense of "alrightness" -- authenticity and rightness.
You may be nutty as a fruitcake according to someone else, but as long as you are not scaring horses or harming women and children, you are probably Mighty Alright.
It is alright to be different, to be the blue flower in a field of gold, to be yourself.