Two weeks ago, I shared the circumstances surrounding the
prolonged engagement of me and my husband, and today it’s time to delve into
the many ways God grew and sustained us during that season. If you missed Part 1, I’d encourage you to read it before continuing here.
Perhaps one of the most obvious lessons to us during the
extra year of engagement was that waiting time is not wasted time.
There were definitely occasions when we felt the delay was taking more than it
was giving, but God graciously gave us eyes to see the many ways in which the
waiting was purposeful. For one, we read at least six engagement/marriage books
together and answered countless relationship-building questions, which gave us
an even stronger base of understanding and practice in communication before we
became husband and wife. My fiancé was able to build up some extra savings
because of the additional year of work before we got married. I was able to be
here to help family when a new baby was born and when a grandmother required
24/7 care.
Avoiding the trap of focusing on what could have been wasn’t
always easy, though. For example, I had left my job when my contract ended in
June 2020, anticipating moving that month. Had I known I would have been in the
States a whole extra year, I could have kept working. But I didn’t know, so my
contract wasn’t renewed, and my position was eliminated. There were times I
thought of the money I wasn’t making, the projects I wasn’t finishing, and the
time I wasn’t getting to spend with coworkers and was left feeling frustration with
a present I hadn’t been able to foresee.
But then God would gently turn my eyes to the gifts I would
have missed if I had still been working a 9-to-5 that whole year—gifts like
being able to talk to my fiancé for longer periods of time and at times that
worked best for him instead of only on my lunch break, gifts like having the
time and space to focus on wedding planning instead of having to juggle it with
a job, gifts like spending more days and holidays with grandparents before
moving across the ocean, gifts like being physically present to help my parents
with caring for their parents and having the freedom to travel back and forth
from state to state to do so, gifts like having the time and mental energy to get
my genealogy business going and to start a new creative outlet to help educate
others about history and genealogy.[i]
After waiting so long to meet each other, we felt the pangs of losing a year of
married life, but God sustained us by reminding us of the many things we had
gained in its place.
We also saw the truth of Proverbs 21:1 played out in real
time. That verse states, “The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of
the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (ESV). In other words, even government
officials are under God’s control. We saw this in the speed and ease with which
my fiancé and his family got their visas renewed. We saw it in the ease of
entry all of them had to the States at different times and in different cities.
And these glimpses showed us that God is capable of making easy what
seems incredibly difficult or even impossible to us, which also
reminded us that if borders weren’t opening to travel, it meant God had a
reason why. Even if we didn’t know what His reason was, we knew He was able to
open literal borders and would do so when the time was right.
In the times when our hearts felt impatient or forgotten,
the Holy Spirit reminded our heads that God is trustworthy. He reminded us that
God knows everything we know and everything we don’t know, so it only
makes sense to trust our lives and our future to Him with His limitless
perspective instead of wringing our hands with worries based on our limited
one. We know, because we have been adopted as His children thanks to the work
and death of Jesus on our behalf, that He has our best interests at heart. So
why not rest in His goodness, knowing that He is both kind and capable to work
all things for His glory and our good?
In addition to these reminders God gave us, often through
His Word, another of the biggest blessings during the waiting time was the
prayers and words of encouragement from fellow followers of Jesus. By choosing
to share our story with others, with all its struggles and joys, we reaped the
great benefit of seeing how God is glorified when His family supports
each other. We had people on almost every continent and in nearly ten
time zones beseeching God on our behalf, and the knowledge that these prayer
warriors were battling alongside us lifted our spirits in ways not much else
did.
More than once, people would text me out of the blue to see
how I was doing on a day when I was particularly struggling or would message us
on the very day something big was happening, unbeknownst to them, to say they
had been led to pray. Many sisters in Christ obeyed God’s instruction to “Rejoice
with those who rejoice” and “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15, ESV),
both literally crying with me and exulting with me in turn. We were greatly
encouraged by the faithfulness of the family of God.
But being so open about our journey also brought
opportunities for growth in addition to encouragement. We had to learn how to be
understanding when people don’t understand. As much as we shared about
our situation, it was still impossible for people truly to know what it was
like to be in it themselves. Many people shared experiences from their own
stories that were applicable to ours in a general way and were very helpful,
but no one had lived through a situation exactly like ours, and we found that
many people didn’t understand all the complications our particular situation
involved.
As a result, we got a lot of well-meaning advice disguised
in the form of questions. “Why don’t you just get married in the U.S.?” was
by-far the most common. Knowing when to give the full spiel of why for a long
period of time that either wasn’t possible or wasn’t a good idea and when just
to smile and nod was a bit exhausting. But looking back now, I can see that God
used those situations as a training ground for me to exercise my spiritual
muscles of kindness, gentleness, and patience toward others—a lesson I have a
feeling He’s going to keep teaching me in the coming years.
Once the door did seem to be opening for us to get married
in the U.S., we faced another round of inner questioning as we made the
decision to walk through that door. We had decided even before we were
officially engaged to have our wedding overseas and had developed the idea of a
stateside blessing ceremony to be able to involve our American family and
friends in witnessing the commitment we were making to God and to each other.
It was difficult for me to think about getting married with
my parents as the only representatives of my family there and with none of my
friends present, but being able to have ceremonies in both places made an
overseas wedding more agreeable, since both sides of the family would be able
to participate in an in-person ceremony that way. Nonetheless, there were still
a lot of thoughts of what I would miss by not having the wedding in America,
and I kept telling myself, “Those things aren’t important. What’s important is
that we get married.” Once the decision was made, though, I began finding
excitement in all the positives of having a wedding overseas, to the point that
I was quite emotionally invested in getting married in my fiancé’s hometown and
was looking forward to all the cultural elements that would be absent from our
wedding if it were to happen in the States.
Fast-forward through almost two years of this anticipation,
and we suddenly found ourselves facing the decision to scrap all of those plans
and to have only one ceremony—our wedding ceremony—in the United States. All
those things we had been looking forward to—the chance to honor a cultural
tradition of getting married in the groom’s hometown, the opportunity for my
in-laws to plan their son’s wedding as is the custom in their culture, the unforgettable
experience of celebrating with a massive (to me), exuberant family, the joy of
coming home from our honeymoon to our very own home—all those things we had to learn
once again to hold with open hands and say, “Those things aren’t important.
What’s important is that we get married.”
But after the eighteen-month-long rollercoaster of a journey
with God, we found ourselves changing our self-talk a bit. As we asked
ourselves what was really most important to us, it wasn’t just that we get
married. It was that God would be abundantly glorified in our marriage
ceremony. Our day, just like our lives, wasn’t ultimately about us, it
was about Him. Wherever it happened, whenever it happened, we wanted to
be husband and wife, absolutely, positively, most definitely, but we wanted glory
for God’s Name most of all.
In January 2020, we would have told you that we wanted God
to be glorified in our wedding, but at the end of the subsequent year and a
half of waiting and wondering, we emerged to find that God had been doing a
deeper work in our hearts, loosening our grip on the earthly things we had been
holding onto more strongly than we had been holding onto Him. With our
reoriented hearts, we prayed more sincerely that those who came to celebrate
with us or who witnessed online would leave with a sense of the depth of God’s
love and would come to know His abundant goodness as much as we had during the
season of our waiting. And in yet another act of graciousness, He gave us
glimpses after the wedding of how our prayers had been answered, increasing His
glory all the more and showing us how the twisted road to our wedding was worth
it, because it ultimately led people (ourselves included) to be pointed to Him.
So if I had to summarize the last year and a half in a
single sentence, I would say it like this: Life in limbo is rarely fun, but for
followers of Jesus it is bountiful and beautiful, full of many blessings from
the Good Shepherd who leads us gently through.
[i] For those wondering, that creative outlet is called Time Tracing: How to Engage with History, and you can find it on Instagram and Facebook @time.tracing.
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