Neale Donald Walsch - The Wedding Vows from Conversations with God: with Nancy Fleming-Walsch

Conversations with God, Book 1

Conversations with God, Book 2

Conversations with God, Book 3

Conversations with God, Book 1 Guidebook

Meditations from Conversations with God, Book 1

Meditations from Conversations with God, Book 2: A Personal Journal

The Little Soul and the Sun

Questions and Answers on Conversations with God

Neale Donald Walsch on Abundance and Right Livelihood

Neale Donald Walsch on Relationships

Neale Donald Walsch on Holistic Living

Friendship with God

Copyright 2000

by Neale Donald Walsch

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Introduction
Neale Donald Walsch

To Lovers From Lovers Some Sacred Thoughts About Love
Diane V. Cirincione, Ph.D.
and
Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D.

The Truest Heart
Marianne Williamson

And They Lived Happliy Ever After
Nancy Fleming-Walsch

Afterword
Neale Donald Walsch

L ove is that which is unlimited. There is no beginning and no end to it. No before and no after. Love always was, always is, and always will be.

CWG 3 p. 206

L ove is the ultimate reality. It is the only. The all. The feeling of love is your experience of God.

CWG 1 p. 56

If you are in love as you read thisif you have gone so far as to be planning your wedding and preparing for a life together with anothermy heart sings for you! You are in a glorious place, experiencing a glorious feeling. This is the place of Divine Relationship, and what you are experiencing is All Encompassing Love. It is from this place that all creation springs. It is this song of love that all the universe sings. It is singing to you and through you now, and the heavens rejoice that its melody has found voice again on Earth.

You are embarking now on a wonderful journey, forming a partnership of the soul. This is the natural order of things, for in our world very little of your Self is best experienced or best expressed alone. It is only through your relationship with another person, place, or thing that you can experience yourself as anything at all while you are here in the Realm of the Relative. And the more magnificent your relationship with that other person, place, or thing, the more magnificent will be your experience of Self.

Relationship with another person in the partnership that we call marriage creates a perfect environment for magnificence expressed, for it is an outward manifestation of an inner truth about our actual state of being.

In truth, we are all married.

To everyone.

We are all one, and marriage can reflect this reality more vividly, more immediately, more continuously, more joyfully, and more impactfully than even you, as in love as you are right now, might imagineif you use marriage as it was intended: not to get something from another, but to give something to another, and to share something with another, thus to know yourself as The Other.

This is the Divine Purpose of marriage, that the two shall truly become One.

Because marriage is the most intimate relationship you can have with another, it provides you with a chance to experience the most intimate relationship you have ever had with yourself. You can come to know yourself better as a result of marriage, and you can also become better than you know yourself to be, for marriage offers you with wonderful day-to-day, moment-to-moment opportunities to recreate yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision you ever held about Who You Are.

Used in these ways, your marriage will be a sacred experiencewhich is exactly what it was intended to be.

All things sacred are based in truth. You will want, therefore, everything about your marriage to be an expression of your own highest truth, including the words you say on your wedding day.

When Nancy and I decided to get married we looked around for the right and perfect wedding vows to exchange with each other. We wanted a ceremony that spoke the truth of our hearts, and that allowed us to make promises that we knew we could keep.

Nothing that we found from the more traditional sources, however, seemed to fit. We could have compromised, I suppose, and said what the ceremonies gave us to say, but we just didn't want to exchange words with each other on our wedding day that we knew we didn't mean literally. So we decided, as many couples do, to write our own vows. And we thought of them as wedding statements more than promises, out of our understanding that no one can really promise anything with a 100 percent guarantee, but that what we could do with integrity was make Statements of Intention. Conversations with God says that life proceeds out of your intention for it, and so we knew that this was a very powerful place from which to come, not only on our wedding day, but every day of our lives.

Well, those Statements of Intention have produced some pretty amazing results. Nancy and I are having the most wonderful time of our lives. We are seeing that marriage can truly be experienced as an opportunity, not an obligation; as a place of growing excitement, not diminishing energy; as a chance for greater freedom, not less expression of the wonder of who we are.

One outcome that we did not expect, however, was that our wedding day statements would wind up being used by thousands of people around the world on their wedding day. It's happened because I got talked into placing the Statements of Intention Nancy and I had written into the text of Conversations with God, Book 3 as I was writing it. That was not something I had planned to do, but in the dialogue, as the discussion began to revolve around love relationships, I was invited to insert our wedding vows into the book as an example of how a spirit-centered, freedom-granting marriage ceremony might be created. I gave in to that impulse, never thinking that people all over the world would write, asking permission to use the ceremony and its statements for their own weddings.

Nancy and I knew, of course, that the statements were wonderful, because we could see the wonderful outcomes they had produced in our own lives. And I even had the idea as I placed them into CWG that they might one day be made available in a separate little book, for other couples to useexactly as is, or in modified formfor their own marriage ceremonies. What I didn't think was that people would find the words that we wrote so right for them that they would begin using them immediately, copying them right out of the book, even before we could get this smaller book out!