Moving Up: An Engaging Discussion

So, about this whole marriage thing ... it's really great, but there's something that gets me about it - maybe its that long engagement thing. I'm not too down with that.

Actually, that's not really how it happened. Alyse and I were praying about our wedding, and we got this sense that the date wasn't going to be when we thought it was. We talked to some people about the wisdom of moving it up and got mixed responses. So we kept praying. One night, we got our answer - God told us "January." So we're moving the date up to January 3, 2009.

This is very exciting and scary at the same time, because there is a lot to do between now and then. We're planning a wedding while school, work, and (any semblance of a) social life fight for our limited time. Neither of us have ever planned a wedding, etc. But it is exciting because I cannot wait to spend the rest of my life with Alyse, to keep learning how to love her in new and deeper ways.

We need your prayer in this; prayer for wisdom, prayer for provision, prayer for sanity. We're stepping out in faith -- one of the most important parts of this engagement is that it is God's timing and not ours (I was ready to wait until after college) -- so we want one of the most important parts of our marriage to be God's timing and our faith in His active role in our relationship. That's a hard balance to maintain because everything in the world screams against it - and God is so paradoxial and difficult to understand that what He wants often doesn't makes sense.

We want to be where God is, where God leads us. He guides our steps and makes our paths straight. We want to walk towards Jesus (like Peter on the water), not caring what is around us or underneath us or behind us, as long as He's there. And we're still trying to figure out how to do that in the daily grind. So please keep us in your thoughts and prayers ...

Thanks.