I remember that Wednesday afternoon so vividly.  We had just landed in Italy earlier that day…the heat of Rome in the summer was overwhelming…and the two of just stood there.  Staring.  We were in the middle of a crowded piazza – sweat rolling down the side of our face – with the Pantheon directly in front of us and we truly couldn’t believe our eyes.  We couldn’t believe the history…the stories…the immensity of what we were looking at.  When we finally absorbed the reality of where we were…we decided to go inside.  That’s when I ran my hand along the outer beams of the Pantheon and saw up close the bullet holes.  They were everywhere.  This structure had seen it all; battles…war…victory.  And it still stood tall carrying the weight of two thousand years.

We spent a long time at the Pantheon before heading out for dinner.  And later that night, as we sat next to Bernini’s Fountain of Four Rivers, eating the best lasagna we’ve ever had, we started to talk about the unbelievable amount of history that was all around us.  The ruins…the power…the influence.  But even more so, were all of the smaller stories that happened in between; the children who grew up playing among those ruins…the celebrations that happened in those piazzas…the couples who fell in love staring at the Pantheon.  Those stories may not be written in the history books…but that history is what built everything around us.  That history built the people around us.

I worked on Parliament Hill for four years after I graduated from University and – to this day – I never get tired of seeing it’s beautiful structure.  I never get tired of remembering what happened inside those walls and who walked through the doors.  But just like Ancient Rome…our own history is home to countless other stories; the quieter stories…the smaller stories…the love stories.

Like the story of Gillian and Phil…who met just outside of Center Block one day.  By chance…by fate…by divine intervention…they found each other in this crazy world, standing in front of the Peace Tower.  While centuries worth of stories rushed around them…their own story was only just beginning.  Right there.  In the very center of a much bigger story.

And isn’t that what all of our stories really are?  An intricate part of something bigger…something wider…something more important than ourselves…

Because our stories become someone else’s history…someone else’s chapter…someone else’s beginning.

And on a cold and rainy Spring day…family and friends gathered around to celebrate one of the most beautiful stories ever written.  A story about two of the most wonderful people you’ll ever meet.  A story that happened because two people fell in love…