It's like Christmas...

Ok, let's see if I can say this and have it make sense OUTSIDE of my head.

So, to me, this wedding is sort of like Christmas. I don't mean that I'll get a lot of gifts, or give a lot of gifts (though both are true...). I don't mean that there will be singing, rejoicing, and praising of the Lord (though, again, also true). It's also not that we're getting dressed up and going to church (yeah, still true, though a bit of a stretch here, since we tend to go to church most Sundays, though decidedly not usually as dressy as we will that day). For me, it's more of a time/distance thing. Ok, let me try and explain.

When I was a kid, and even now to some extent, the whole year Christmas seemed a million miles away. Like, it's so far away, it's never going to happen. Sort of like most people look at a meteor the size of Texas hitting the earth, or the NEXT millennium, or seeing Haley's comet, or moving to the moon. So far away, so almost unlikely that they barely register as real on our radar. Sure, they are real (well, maybe not living on the moon, and let's hope not on the meteor one) but they are so very far away in time that it almost becomes a distance. A distance that your feet could never walk.

And maybe we will be around to see Haley's Comet or people living on the moon, but there will be a lot of time and miles between here and there.

Whenever Christmas actually DID come around, I was always surprised and amazed. Because the rest of the year it felt so far off, it didn't seem like I had traveled enough time and distance for it to finally be firmly in my lap. Almost like in my head, Christmas was really every two years or every three, or maybe even every four like Leap Year. But there it popped up, every year, taking me by surprise by how quickly it had arrived once again.

So how does this relate to the wedding, you ask? If you're still with me, that is! I'll tell you how!

I am twenty-eight years old, soon to be twenty-nine. I have long waited for and yearned for a man like Kevin. When I first met him, I kept waiting for "the other shoe to drop". Everything was right, and that never happens. Something always goes wrong and you go back to the drawing board and ask God for patience and faith that He has a wonderful plan for your life. You keep putting together pieces of the puzzle, hoping to see a bigger picture if you squint and use your imagination. But it never seemed to me that it would actually happen. It seemed SO FAR AWAY, to meet a wonderful guy that would love me as much as I deserved to be loved. It seemed so very distant, to get proposed to. In fact, I was trying to explain this to Kevin right before he proposed.

Here is how distant this seemed to me: We had gone ring shopping. I had PICKED OUT A RING. (I didn't know he had gotten it, but all signs pointed towards yes) We were talking engagement, we were talking wedding, we were talking marriage. We spent the day at my cousin's wedding, discussing what we liked and might reproduce at our own wedding. He had me sitting there on his bed, he had a present to give to me, and I saw the ring box in the drawer. In the back of my mind, I registered that it MIGHT be a ring box, that he MIGHT be proposing. But it seemed so very distant, it seemed like walking to the moon away, that I brushed aside that thought.

When he actually proposed, I was totally shocked. It came out of no where. Boom. Like that meteor.

SO now there is a wedding. We're planning it. Planning is coming along quite nicely. I might even have some shoes! Signs point towards yes! There is a countdown on my phone, I can see how many days are left. How many weeks. How many months. I can see it ticking down. But still, sometimes I'm walking along, doing my thing, and it hits me. Boom. I'm getting married. Boom. I'm engaged. Boom. I get to spend the rest of my life with this amazing man.

It still baffles me. But it's a good sort of baffled. It's a "I'm really really blessed" sort of baffled. And I don't have to squint so much to see the picture in the puzzle. All the pieces aren't in yet, but it's looking like a beautiful, beautiful day. And I get to share it with the love of my life, a man whose hand I love to hold.

XOXOXO