The Most Important Part

When I moved to LA six years ago for college, I really fell in love with the city. Although I visited all the time, it was a much different experience to live in downtown and experience city life. I discovered an entirely new world away from Chino, CA and found a lot of my favorite places that I always talk about - and I continue to find new ones! One of those favorite places was only a couple blocks away from the house where I lived during my senior year. It is one of the most beautiful catholic churches that I have seen (in the U.S.) and I knew that if the time ever came for me to get married, and in LA, I wanted it to happen at this church not only because it was so pretty but also because of of its location and all that it represented.

These pics are pretty crappy and I've been meaning to take some new ones, but here it is in all its beauty on a sunny October day in downtown Los Angeles - Saint Vincent De Paul Catholic Church:





Felipe and I visited the church for the first time together back in August for their marriage informational meeting. That's when we learned about all of the requirements to get married at St Vincent. They told us that before we can even meet with the priest we had to gather all of our sacrament documents, take a one-day marriage preparation course, and register for a weekend marriage preparation retreat that is usually booked months in advance (which it was - we signed up for one in March). Well gathering our religious sacrament documents was not much of a problem since both our parents had them mainly stashed away in files. The hardest part for that was getting a copy of Felipe's original baptism certificate mailed from Mexico. Then, we signed up and went to our one-day marriage preparation course in September at a parish in Long Beach. This was actually a lot of fun and a good experience for us. It was pretty much what you would expect from a pre-marriage counseling event, but good in the sense that you really get to focus on the true meaning of marriage (i.e., not just the wedding) and getting married in the catholic church. Even though there were a lot of other couples at the same session, it was really a day that was just for us to communicate about this new stage in our lives. Because of that, I'm looking forward to our retreat in March.

After we had everything we needed to meet with the priest, we called him to make an appointment and got a voicemail message that he was out of town for all of September. This forced us to wait until October to call again, and after about a week of phone tag we were finally able to set an appointment - whew! A couple weeks ago, we met with Father Restrepo, told him the date that we would like, gave him all our documents, and finalized the deal! YAY! It was so exciting to meet the person who would be marrying us in the perfect church and on the perfect date and time. After that, I knew that the most important part was taken care of. We are getting married the way I have always imaged it - no matter the weather or flowers or decorations or any other of those minor details in comparison to the actual marriage. It's really happening and I can't wait!