August 26th. Remember that.

WE'RE ENGAGED!!!

Joseph hasn't had a lot of room for surprising me, but he's been doing a fantastic job of finding ways to do just so. We've been dating for almost three months now and from the very beginning we've dated with the intention of marriage. We didn't expect it to come up so soon, but the Lord decided to allow us to go at a faster speed than normal people do. Which is totally fine by us.

We struggled for a while on picking a wedding date. The dominant piece of advice we seemed to get from people was "Don't marry for a long time," and that was a hard thing to hear. So we prayed about it, and God told us a wedding date individually. We compared notes, and they were the same! It just becomes more and more exciting to see how God is so wrapped in our relationship.

That was a couple of weeks ago, and the wedding planning has really begun. Joseph was fantastic and bought a HUGE wedding planner that you know is serious about getting down to business (the thing has tabs, for heaven's sake). By the way, he didn't just hand it to me. He drove over to my house, sneaked it onto the porch, and then ran to his car to text me and ask if I could look for his headphones that he thought he dropped outside. I texted back saying "I looked all outside and even inside... I don't see them!" Then I sent another text saying "Just kidding, I found it."

I've already been wedding dress shopping once, and we're narrowing down our decision of where the reception will be. In fact, we have a few details covered. Yeah, there's a lot more details to go, but my point is that we started officially planning and we still weren't even engaged. We had the ring we both loved, and he had to really pray hard to God to give him proposal ideas.

Well, God nailed it. Last night I had my pajamas on, my face was washed, I was wearing glasses, and was sitting in bed listening to music when Joseph called. He asked if I could come up to our church, because he'd had a bad day or whatever downright lie he came up with. I glanced at my clock and at my pajamas and told him I'd be there in a few minutes. A few minutes took a few minutes longer because there was a train in between myself and the church while I drove towards the intersection I usually take, and thank God that there was no train by the time I reached it. Apparently that's God's way of stalling for time, because Joseph was frantically asking God to delay my drive as he ran around getting ready.

So I finally reached the church. He had said he was in the youth room, so I went up to the door and knocked. I ended up banging on the door three different times because he didn't seem to hear me. Finally he emerged from the room and came to open the door for me. I was giving him a hard stare at this point, and he admitted, "I'm hyperventilating right now."

"Why?" I asked, but as we stepped inside the youth room, my question was immediately answered.

Picture being greeted with this:

in a room that means a lot to both of you because it's where you first remember seeing each other, in the dark, with a bunch of balloons all over the place, while your favorite song plays, with a visibly nervous person that you love by your side.

Yeahhhh, I could tell pretty quickly what was going on.

I thought he would drop to one knee right there, but he just kept on surprising me. He said he had a story he had written, and so I read it out loud. There were a few blank places for me to add in my own words, so I kept stopping and thinking about what to write in. The story was about a young hero who fights and defeats an evil rabbit (the rabbit being my idea), and in honor of that, there were balloons that came to someone special every year. And there was something inside each of the balloons.

And Joseph says he's not creative!

So I grabbed a pen and started popping balloons and reading the piece of paper inside each one. I eventually stopped doing the one-by-one thing and just hacked at all of the balloons at once to get it over with. Joseph burst out laughing and picked up the balloons pieces as I read the pieces of paper. They were verses from Song of Songs, one of Ephesians 5 where it talks about how husbands ought to love their wives as Christ loves the church, and a bunch of little inside jokes. Then I had to hunt for one special balloon, which had this inside:

(It says "Will you marry me?" if you can't read it... he knows I like handwritten notes, and dear Lord I'm keeping this paper and carrying it in my pocket to heaven.)

As I read it, he dropped to one knee and produced THE RING that I had picked out and that we both absolutely fell in love with. I don't have a good, close-up picture of it yet, but it'll definitely happen. I don't remember what he said. It was something about how he loved me and stuff, and I don't remember what I said either. We can only assume it was along the lines of "yes" because I pretty much form tackled him in a huge hug right there.

We knelt down at the foot of the cross the best we could amongst the candles and pale roses with flushed, red tips (my favorite roses) and prayed for God to bless us, that He would continue to stay the center of our relationship, and that we would love each other the way He loved us.

And I swear, I could feel Him standing there grinning down at us.