Rachelle Friedman was overwhelmed with excitement. Her future with fiance Chris Chapman was bright and promising. She and her bridesmaids escaped to Virginia Beach in May of 2010 for her bachelorette party. And then they dashed to the pool for an evening swim.
WeathersBut a playful push from a laughing friend changed everything. Friedman plunged in headfirst, neglecting to notice that she was at the shallow end of the pool. She knew immediately something was wrong. “As soon as I hit the water, I felt my body kind of stiffen up. I went numb and I kind of heard a crack in my neck,” she told the Today Show. That cracking sound was her C6 cervical vertebra. Since that day she can feel nothing below her collarbone, and doctors say she will never walk again.
From perfect to paralyzed. A crippled bride.
If you were Chris Chapman, what would you do? The woman you thought would glide down the aisle to meet you at the altar cannot walk, let alone glide. She is no longer the image of perfection, and the future he anticipated was forever lost at the bottom of that pool. What would you do? Walk away? Or stay, and marry her anyway?
Love is a powerful motivator. And grace coupled with love is unstoppable. If things had changed, if Chris had walked away, she would be any other paralyzed person whose dreams were dashed by cruel imperfection and whose heart was broken by a man unwilling to pay the price of sacrifice. And we would have never heard of either of them. But the reason we know this story is that Chris Chapman never blinked. Crippled or not, Rachelle was still his bride. They married this June.
The Bible compares our relationship to God with a marriage. It’s an image that displays both God’s goodness and our unworthiness. We are tainted, spiritually crippled by sin, paralyzed by our pride and self-destructive choices.
But He knows us, and He waits. With sacrifice we cannot explain and grace we cannot repel, He waits at the altar for His beloved to come and meet Him. He doesn’t walk away. He doesn’t turn His back. He stays. Because crippled or not, He loves us anyway.