We OFFICIALLY have a date!!!

Yep, the moment we all have been waiting and praying for has FINALLY arrived! Thank you everyone for your support and prayers in this! God's so good! Okay, so are you ready?









Do you need some more anticipation?










I waited for nearly four months for this! I gotta make you work for it a little! :)









Ready?????????












May 29th, 2010!!!!!!







Hooray!!

Well, that means I have a little over 11 weeks (exactly 80 days from today) to get everything done! It's going to be crazy, and maybe nearly impossible, but sooo worth it! Thanks so much again everyone for your prayers for us! Please continue to pray for us, especially with only 11 weeks to plan, and 9 of those weeks I'll be finishing up school! But we are very very excited to finally have a date and to move forward in this engagement!


Oh and this is a picture of my Aunt and Uncle's backyard where we'll be getting married. Gorgeous, no? :)




We're so excited!!! :)

God’s sense of Humor

Just for fair warning, this is a long one! But so much good came out of it!

So, on Sunday I decided to search for wedding stuff, again. I ended up emailing a vendor to get a price estimate, and on Monday I got an email back. And whoa buddy, it was not pretty. Everything in a wedding is soooo expensive!! Anyway, I talked to Kristjan that night and after we hung up I just had this huge feeling of despair, yet again.

It seems like every time I feel okay about this wedding and not knowing anything, that God comes in and is like, yeah, actually, you’re still not trusting me. Here, let me show you. Think you trust me with money? Look how much this costs. Think you trust me with a date? Oh actually it may not happen at that time period. It might be 3 months later. Think you have a plan for not having a plan? Yeah, um no. You don’t anymore. So with everything gone, do you still trust me?

My answer: No!

Everyday I feel like I’m in a battle over this wedding. It shouldn’t be like this right? I should have gotten a date for this wedding within a few weeks of getting engaged, right? I should have my dress, bridesmaid dresses, flowers, hair, photographer, caterer, guest list, honeymoon, ceremony music, reception music, invitations, centerpieces, yadda yadda yadda by now, right? But do I? No! Why? Cause I don’t have a freaking date!!

Obviously this all came to a head Monday night as I cried my eyes out in the shower, begging, pleading for God to please please PLEASE give us a date! I said to Him, Lord, everything in this wedding, the decorations, the dresses, the location, the food, the whatevers, none of that matters anymore. Yeah, of course I would love a beautiful wedding with amazing decorations and details. But when it comes down to it, I’ve realized how petty that all really is. Father, my dream wedding isn’t something that will be defined by ribbons or bows, by tuxes or suits, by lilies or dandelions, by a 5 star meal or only lima beans to eat. Father, what I really truly care about is that on that day, I’ll be getting married. And I don’t want my guests to come to simply watched a “pretty” wedding, I want them to come to experience this day with us. I don’t want a wedding that is merely for spectators, but I want something much more meaningful and deeper than that. I want a wedding where I can bring joy to my family and friends and where we can all share this joy together. Something where when people leave they won’t be thinking, “Oh what a beautiful wedding, I loved their flowers, and the food was pretty good too!” No, I want my guests to leave and think, “Wow, what a beautiful wedding. I just got to experience something really special, something rich, something called love. Something where I didn’t just come and watch people sniffle and cry, but I got to witness a true love between these two human beings and where they in turn involved us in the wedding. I didn’t just witness a beautifully decorated day, but rather I actually just witnessed a marriage between two souls.”

So Father, you can see my heart behind this. It isn’t superficial and it isn’t for my own selfish reasons. So how come I can’t just get a date, if for nothing else for me to be excited for the day I can start this new chapter in my life? A day where I marry the man I love and share it with all the people in my life whom we love?

His answer: silence.

UGH! I thought Tuesday morning. REALLY? STILL? NOTHING? What the heck!

Enter from Stage Left, Mom.

Yo momma, this is whats up, and it really stinks!!!!!!!

Mom, of course, had wonderfully wise comments. After a long 2 and a half hour skype chat, I finally felt at peace again and as if okay, God, whatever you decide to do is really okay with me. If I don’t know for a long time that’s alright, because I’m trusting you’re going to make this so much better than I could dream. Lord, it looks completely impossible at this moment for anything to work out! We only have two weekends available, and neither of those really work without compromising other important factors. So God, I’ll trust that you’ll make something work and pull out some sort of miracle here because you love to do the impossible when all hope seems lost.

So, for most of the day I felt pretty good and at peace.

Then I talked to Kristjan.

“Well, I got an email back from my detailer. There’s good news and bad news.”

Oh boy, here we go.

“The good news, we may have a date. The bad news? My detailer told me to plan on getting off of my ship in OCTOBER.”

OCTOBER?!?! YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS GOD! That’s so much further away than we thought, and even so it may not still be set in stone? What’s next? We wait until then and then JK it’s actually October of 2022? NO THANKS!

God: silence.

I hate when you’re so quiet and all this stuff is thrown at me from left field!

God: Shhhhh. Talk this out. With him, Kristjan. Talk to him.

Me to Kristjan: Well, I’m worried about this and this and this. I can’t see this working or that. What the heck I don’t want to wait that long. I don’t want to get married sooner either. I wanted to get married in July. My heart was set on it. This really really stinks! And I have no idea what to do!

(Well to make an already very long and eventful story only a tiny bit shorter, we talked and talked and talked. I eventually calmed down enough to think straight)

Me: Okay, so what you’re telling me is that I could do the second 5 week internship from late June to late July, we could get married in late May, and then have 5 or 6 weeks together before your deployment?

Kristjan: Yep. Either that, or we get married in October. Or we wait and see if God wants us to do some unknown third option.

(Pros for May: About 100. Pros for October: 0. Pros for other: 2)

Me: May’s looking pretty good to me. So what should we do?

Kristjan: Pray. Talk to our families. See what they think about all this.

Me: Yeah, maybe after tomorrow we’ll have a better idea on what to do next.

So God, I think I was so set on July and my plan for not having a plan that you did this to stop me in my tracks and show me something possibly much better than what I was thinking. I was dead-set against getting married before Kristjan left for deployment. He felt like it could be a good thing. Then his deployment got pushed back a month.

My thoughts? Maybe this is so he won’t have to go on deployment and we can get married in July without him having to leave!

God’s thoughts: Maybe, but maybe not.

Maybe, his deployment got pushed back so that we could get married in May and have several weeks together before he left for deployment. Maybe when he gets back there won’t be any time to squeeze a wedding in. Maybe May is the best time so that both of your families can come. Maybe it would be better to have that first month or so together and see each other much more than you would if you got married shortly before moving to South Carolina. Maybe this actually is the better way to start our marriage rather than waiting until after he gets back from deployment. Maybe… just maybe.

Hmm God, you know, you’re a lot funnier than people give you credit for. Here I was, so sure of something, and you watch me and give a loving laugh. Then you pick me up with my feet still running in the air, like a dog does when it hovers over a bath tub, and set me back down in a completely different direction. So I’m off and running! And thanks for understanding me when I’m so frustrated with life, and with you. I’m so glad you haven’t given up on me even though I really stink at this whole trusting thing.

So tomorrow, we’ll talk to our parents and see. And maybe tomorrow we’ll have a date? Or maybe they’ll shed some light and wisdom on things we didn’t think about. Either way it’s a step forward, and another learning curve for me to be open-minded about God’s plan and not so stuck on my own.

Wedding Rings!

Last weekend Kristjan and I were supposed to go order our wedding rings, but some things happened on his ship and he was unable to make it up to Waldorf last weekend. So we decided we would do it this past Friday, because he was supposed to have the day off. But, of course, something came up and he ended up having to go into work on Friday until the early afternoon. So by the time he got up here, it was too late to go order the rings, and we also had to go to pre-marital counseling that night. Saturday comes, and finally we get the chance to go order our rings!

We decided to go to the same place Kristjan went to for my engagement ring. They're a family owned business and have high-quality work and pay attention to detail. One of the many many reasons I love my engagement ring is because I know that it is completely unique and that no one else in the world has one like it! So we came up with a design for Kristjan's ring and decided on a verse to engrave on the inside of the rings. Kristjan's design is also very special to us, and will also be a one-of-a-kind ring.

When he was at OCS for 4 months in the summer of 2008, I'd write letters to him every day (the only other form of communication we had that summer was one phone call a week on Sundays for about 30 minutes or less). Well somewhere during our letters back and forth we came up with a special symbol that we would write on the inside of the envelope of our letters. It'll be too difficult to explain here, so I'll have to post a picture of his ring when we get them. Anyway, that is the design he wanted to have on his ring. As if a wedding ring wasn't meaningful enough already! And they also told us that when they make the rings, they'll cast them together, which we thought was really awesome. Anyway, we were both very happy with our order and the whole experience just made the wedding feel that much more real!

Oh and something else that was pretty cool - Kristjan told me later on that evening that it was exactly one year ago on that day (March 6) that he bought my diamond in Israel. So if we had ordered our rings earlier as we had planned on, we wouldn't have had that cool little connection between our rings. All in all, it was a pretty exciting day, both this year and last :)

Alas, no date yet.

Hi there,

So, we still don't have a date. I've been pretty frustrated about this and have felt that it just isn't fair! But, fortunately, I have a wonderful fiance, mom, best friend, and other family and friends who have really encouraged me to not be discouraged! And after a few long chats with the Big Guy upstairs, I've realized that I have been afraid to really come to grips with reality. We have wanted God to be in the center of this, but for that to happen, I have to let go of control. Well, that's the part I had myself fooled on. I thought I was really trusting God with this, until things didn't go my way. I started worrying, stressing, and fearing the worst. What if I don't know the date until a week before? What if no one can come because we have too short of notice? What if I can't get plane tickets for the people who can come? What if? What if? WHAT IF?! At this point in time, God gently tapped me on the shoulder.

"Excuse me, Lindsay?"

"What do you want! This is all your fault anyway!"

"Darling heart, listen to me"

"Okay. Fine."

"Who am I?"

"God"

"God of what?"

"Everything"

"So, if I created the whole world, and I created life, and I created all humans, and I created time, and I created space, and I created love, and I created you and Kristjan, and I created the moment you two met, fell in love, and got engaged, why do you think I have not created the moment you will get married? Why do you think that is somehow beyond my control?"

"Uhh..."

"Have I ever failed you?"

"No"

"Have you ever thought I wasn't going to come through with something"

"Um yes, like every day of my life"

"And then what happened?"

"You came through. You made it better than what I thought I wanted. You told me what to do, and even though I didn't want to or it looked hard or painful, you got me through it and it ended up being about 1000 times better than what I thought I wanted"

"So if you want this day to be special, precious, amazing, etc, why are you not trusting me to take care of it?"

"Because I can't tell what the heck you are doing up there. And I want to know what's going to happen."

"If you knew five years ago what you were going to go through and what was going to happen, what do you think you would've done?"

"Well, to start, I wouldn't have gone to Pittsburgh or to Towson if I had known I wasn't going to make it in dance. And if that hadn't have happened, I wouldn't have met Kristjan or have had all the amazing experiences with Cru at Towson, and I wouldn't have gone on Summer Project or met my best friend."

"Where would you be then?"

"I don't know, but I doubt it could measure up to what the past few years has brought me"

"So.... Why aren't you trusting me with this again?"

"Because I'm lame and can't trust something I can't see. Sorry God, I want to trust you, but I'm pretty much a failure at this."

"You are never a failure in my eyes. But I know this is hard for you, that's why I'm going to help you have the perseverance to get through this, and I'll help teach you how to trust me more. But this is only if you allow me to do so. If you try to do this on your own, it's going to be much harder than if you just trust me and let me work through you. So what do you say? Are you in?"

"Um yeah. You're definitely much better at this than I am"

"Ok, let's get to work"

So since this conversation with the Big Guy, and many more similar to it, I've started having a better feeling about this whole ordeal. I've come to terms with the fact that I really may not know the date until a week prior to the wedding, but if that happens, then God will take care of it. I may only have 5 people there, but that does not mean it won't be meaningful and wonderful. My Dad and Step-mom, Karen, got married with only a handful of people there, and they loved it. So why do I think I have to have at least 100 people there for it to be special? The point is, this is going to be a day where I will marry the man I love, the man that is better than what my dreams ever could have come up with. Isn't that all that really matters?
Well, yes. Yes it is.