The Making Of, Part 1

It’s already time for me to post the first part of the behind-the-scenes story of The King and the Bride! As I know most of my current readership comes from the cast of KATB, you may be saying, “Hel-lo, William, we were there. So why do we need to hear the history?” In my opinion, it is vitally important that we are constantly reminded of the roots of this play, so that we can’t possibly lose sight of the essence of its original message. So without further ado, here it is.

For about six years, the church's children's group KidsPraise! has met every Wednesday night. In September 2008, the group began to discuss the idea of kings and of brides, and more specifically, the King and the Bride. As this teaching went on, the Lord impressed it upon Deacon David in January 2009 to tell the children a story. He began the story with this:

“God’s been giving me a teaching about the church being the Bride [over the last few years,] and he’s given me a story to go along with it. But he hasn’t given me notes...he hasn’t given me props...and he hasn’t really completely filled in the details for me. But he’s given me the sense that tonight I should tell you the story. So I’m just sort of counting that he’s going to tell it to me so that I can tell it to you.”

What followed was the tale that would eventually become The King and the Bride. Many of the play’s eventual detail was absent; some parts were wildly different. But one thing remained constant between the two versions: The boy loved the girl unconditionally.

By the end of the original telling of the story, the girl’s life is a wreck, and she knows she’s helpless to change anything about it. The boy, on the other hand, has become a king, creating a vast gulf between them. Yet bizarrely, improbably, impossibly, he still loves her. And when finally he’s able to convince her that all she has to do is love him back,

“...all of Creation began to sing praise for the event. All of Creation began to praise a king that could love so deeply and without care for worth. And all of Creation–I don’t know if you can picture this–but all of Creation could see what exactly was going on because the light from the king could make everything so obvious, but what they praised had to do with how great his love was and how unrelated it was to the worthiness as the world saw his bride...

“This was a singing that all of Creation had waited for ever since its birth–a time when the king came to his bride.”

Rather prophetically, Deacon David closed by saying,

“I believe that we--you all--will act that story out sometime here. That we’ll do that as a play and tell that story to the world.

“We increasingly live in a world that has less and less hope in it. But God wants us to know that we have the hope of the King who loves so much and has no interest in worth. Worth matters nothing. He loves because he loves.”

The recording of the story was passed out to various members of our church...and that was when Sarah Howell approached him about writing the script. But that’s another story for another time.

Check back next week for Part 2!

–William

P.S. By the way, apologies to anyone who used RSS to subscribe to this blog and who received a super-long version of this post a few minutes ago. Blogspot mysteriously and underhandedly posted an unedited version of this article. Obviously, the computer has got its own agenda.