"I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress..."

Here we are, about a year after I started this endeavor, and I have like… half a dozen posts under my belt. Yikes! I know I warned myself in the past that school would prevent me from updating frequently, but I definitely missed the mark by a hundred miles.  Part of the reason I updated so infrequently was that I couldn't ever really get cozy with the features and layouts available on WordPress (hence the move back to Blogger). In addition, although I was still writing, I had been going through a lot in my personal life.  Many of my drafts expressed feelings that were coming from a really negative place, and since I know at any moment the things I post online could be found and used against me, something always caused me to refrain from publishing those entries. 

The good news is that I have something else monopolizing my free time now (and over the past seven months….):

….I’M GETTING MARRIED!!!

Literally the day after my last post (in July 2010), I went to spend a much-needed two-week break at the beach with family and friends.  The night we arrived, my sweet and wonderful boyfriend completely caught me off guard by popping the question!  As a girl, you spend a lifetime imagining what that moment will be like.  In the end, though, I was too shocked to cry! It wasn’t until later, when we went back to the beach house to tell my parents, that the waterworks really hit high gear.  “The Ugly Cry”—as Oprah often calls it on her show—made an unexpected appearance that evening for all the right reasons.

I can only speak from my personal experience, but it really felt like one of those moments where your whole life flashes before your eyes—the childhood dreams, the adolescent insecurity, those lunchtime rounds of MASH that you secretly wished were true, the broken hearts, the lame dates... the list goes on. Visions of two little old people holding hands on a porch swing occurring simultaneously with the sudden sensation that you are thirteen again and not old enough to get married—my mind was dizzy with all the random thoughts and feelings in that moment!

Most importantly, I felt so thankful and comforted by the knowledge that I had landed exactly in the midst of a moment where my life had always intended to take me.  I can sit here and reflect on choices I made (or choices made for me) that seemed like wrong, painful decisions at the time, but were really opportunities being artfully arranged by God himself to ensure I became the person I was meant to be.  I credit this phenomenon for ending up at Appalachian and meeting the love of my life (even though we didn’t start dating for nearly another three years)!