An orphan asked the internet to fill his wedding tables

Most wedding worries run the other way, toward too many cousins. Xu Chenghong, a 24-year-old from a village in Yunnan, in southwest China, had the opposite problem. His father died when he was three. His mother remarried and left two years later, and the grandmother who raised him and his brother died too. He spent three years saving about 160,000 yuan to marry his girlfriend. But as their October 31 wedding got close, he could see there wouldn't be enough family to fill even a few banquet tables.

So on October 25 he posted a video on Douyin, China's TikTok, inviting anyone who wanted to come. He hoped for 10 or 20 people. By noon on October 28, the Chinese news site Sina reported, two to three thousand had reached the area, bringing pigs, fish, tables, chairs and freezers. Volunteer chefs came to cook. The party outgrew its original venue and moved to a public square, where local officials ran traffic. Xu kept thanking people and asking them to drive carefully on the mountain roads. The reporting comes from China, Asia and Africa; no American outlet had it as of November 1.

Jesus told a story about this problem a few days before his arrest. He told it in the temple, to religious leaders who had already turned him down. A king throws a wedding feast for his son, and the invited guests refuse to come. So the king sends his servants out to the roads to bring in whoever they find, bad and good alike. It isn't a cozy story, since a guest without wedding clothes is thrown out later. Still, the hall that the people with a claim on the king left empty was filled by people with none.

At Xu's wedding the empty seats belonged to the groom, and nobody had to be sent out, because the roads came on their own, some of them with a pig.

A crowd for one Saturday isn't a family for a life. The old psalm that calls God a father to people like Xu promises something longer.

Psalms 68:5-65A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.6God sets the lonely in families. He brings out the prisoners with singing, but the rebellious dwell in a sun-scorched land.

The family Xu was starting that day was with his bride, and the strangers came so he wouldn't start it in an empty room. In Jesus's story the guests from the road were handed a feast, and in Yunnan they carried one in. Either way the hall filled with people who had no tie to the one at the head of the table, and a hall filled that way is a real wedding.