He was there...

When I was young, I often imagined my wedding. I imagined the flowers, the dress, my dad offering his arm - calm, cool, and collected as ever (no small feat for a man living in a house of women), I imagined my mom at the end of that long, petal (or in my case - leaf) covered aisle smiling at me with tears in her eyes, and my sisters just beyond her grinning back at me. Seldom, however, did I imagine the man who would be standing opposite my sisters. He was always a blur, a stranger even when I would dream of the day.

I don't remember the exact moment I met Ricardo, I wish I could! I was a new student at a large school and probably met 50 people that day. I just remember knowing him. He was there, a smiling familiar face in a hallway full of strangers. He was there, waiting on a bench for me after school. He was there, picking me up for our Slurpee runs. He was there, four sleeping bags away at a Senior sleepover. He was there, by my side throughout our Senior party. It wasn't love at first sight, "but it was something" as Ricardo puts it. Something kept us together, kept us in each other's lives through the time and miles and changes that the next few years would present.

I always love telling the story of the first time my mom met Ricardo. We were still in high school and he came to the house with a group of people to pick me up. Once everyone had come in to meet my family, they all loaded back up in their car and waited for me to say goodbye to my parents. Before I could say a word my mother said these exact words to me, "Oh my gosh, he is just the all-American boy, isn't he? You are going to marry that boy one day!" I'm sure I brushed her off. I actually had forgotten all about it until, on a particularly emotional day I cried to my mom about how sad I was that my grandma never got to meet Ricardo. She reminded me of that day because my Grandma had been sitting by her side smiling at me as my mother teased me about my future husband. It was a collision of past, present, and future that I would not learn to appreciate for a few years. Now, it is a most cherished memory.

I have a point. I think.

Fantasizing about my wedding was a joy to me. If I had known what I know now, I would've spent so much more time daydreaming about the days after the wedding. The days of marriage are what I have learned to cherish. Marriage, my friends, makes wedding planning sound like torture! Ricardo and I were lucky enough to be involved in something called Engaged Encounter. The concept of Engaged Encounter is for engaged couples to take a weekend away from wedding planning in order to spend some time marriage planning. DUH, right? It seems simple, but it was so easy to get wrapped up in the music and the dress and the flowers, it's easy to see the groom starting to blur a little.

The experience of Engaged Encounter did two AMAZING things for me. To me, faith is the most intimate thing you can share with a person. My faith, and my husband's faith, are paramount to our story. I read somewhere that the greatest love story ever told, is your own. And our God has been intricately interwoven into our story. On the day that it all nearly came apart, He was there. On the day Ricardo asked me to spend my life with him, He was there. And on the day where I held my future husband's hands, with twenty other tearful couples holding on to each other in a candle-lit room, and swore to him that I would always be his and that we would always be a marriage of three, He was there.

The second blessing came to me more subtly. The days that followed brought on new daydreams of our wedding day, not unlike the ones when I was a little girl. Only this time, I could see the dresses my sisters wore as they waited for me, I could see the sunset calla lilies in my bouquet and the one pinned to my dad's lapel. I could see the leaves gathered around the pews in the old St. Joe's Chapel.

This time, when I looked up, past my mom and my sisters, he was there.

And so was He.