If you don't know much about me, here's some quick insight....growing up I was a helpless romantic.
I dreamt of love, marriage, being swept off my feet, and one day meeting Mr. Perfect. I was told once, by my dear friend and cousin Jocelyn that I was 'in love with love.' I was defensive of course to that description, but knew straight away that she had hit the nail on the head. As if I could have argued with Jocelyn anyways...the girl who had to put up with me swooning over one guy to the next and using her to call boys for me since I was too chicken to do it myself.
Long story short, I was challenged to give that all up by the time I was 21, to stop planning out how my life should be romantically, and focus all that time and energy on more productive things.
So...present day, I'm now 5 months married to my best friend. It's amazing how now I can look back and see God's fingerprints over the journey we had in our relationship, and the path it took once I did finally give up trying to put it all together myself.
I had a wedding present for Matt, a collection of letters tied up with green ribbon, that I had to patiently hold on to for a year during our engagement...which I think keeping silent about was the hardest part leading up to the wedding.
Somewhere in the teenage years we had a youth group night based around the book "When God writes your love story". Although somewhat mushy and fluffy, it does hold some challenges for those waiting to meet the love of their life. Anyways, we spent the night writing letters to our future spouse. I wasn't entirely sure what to think of it, but the romantic in me jumped at such a fantastically sappy activity.
Regardless of how silly some of the things I wrote were, or how naive I was at the time, I kept writing these letters...over the course of about 8 years. Some were prayers for the man I had yet to meet, and others were more ridiculous. There was probably about 20 in total, with the last one being written just after I became good friends with Matt.
So, after a year engagement, I finally got to give this present to Matt. I apologized several times for how silly I might have sounded, because I couldn't remember most of what I had written (it had been 4 years since I had written the last one), and we sat and read through them together.
The result? It was amazing really. Despite how afraid I was of how irrelevant the whole exercise was, and how worried I was about sounding stupid in these letters, we got to see how our paths were coming together even before we met. During several difficult times of Matt's life, there was a corresponding letter with a prayer for him, written from the other side of the world. I had also stuck an Australian pen into one of the last ones I wrote that had gotten left behind when Matt left Canada.
I'm not going to say that I was predestined to meet Matt, or that we're soul mates that were destined to find one another, or any other hopelessly romantic statement. But, what I do love about all of this is the reminder of how things turn out when you put God in the drivers seat. When you stop trying to have control and to plan it all out, and instead just relax...trust God...and enjoy the journey!
I got to give Matt a really special gift, and together we were able to see how God was and is apart of this relationship. It only strengthened the resolve that this marriage must and will include God in it. It also served to remind me....once again....how important it is to remember what God has done in our past, if we hope to have faith for the future.
God is good.
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