Lessons from engagement, #1

Inspired by a friend's title sharing lessons from bedrest, I also would like to share the lessons I am learning from this stage of life. If anything just to document.

Being recently engaged there are a range of emotions that I have experienced over the last couple weeks. Initially there was the floating on the clouds, bubbling over excitement that one expects. Similar to a kid walking into an ice cream parlor for the first time, and tasting that delicious cold mint chocolate chip ice cream.. mm. Then comes the overwhelming feeling of "there is so much to do, and so little time." For me it was a pendulum swing from one to another, the high of emotions in knowing that the person you love has promised to love and care for you, and then the sinking feeling that comes with reality of details...

So here's Lesson #1.

Helpful tip from PD. Keep the main thing the main thing. The main thing is the Gospel. The love of Christ poured out for us through His life, death and resurrection. That is the ultimate thing. Therefore a marriage is a celebration of the grace that we've received and everything else is just STUFF. The marriage is a foreshadowing of the union we will have with Christ when He returns, our bridegroom.

Enlightening and freeing. Everything is just STUFF.

Enlightening because really when placed against the cross, all this wedding planning, is trivial. Important yes, not saying that one should neglect responsibility in being a good steward of time and money, but in the end it is just stuff, things that will pass. What we deem as important preferences now, people we feel like we will be BFF&F&F&Fs will with time and just distance grow apart. Decor and food will pass just as the thought of what we had for breakfast this morning will pass. But what does not pass .. are the feelings and the attitudes you carry through this time. It's been such a growing experience.. I always thought I was a simple person, no big preferences one way or another, go with the flow, chill... but when pushed up against the preferences of others that I don't agree with... I've learn just how UN-chill I am. Humbling this process is, learning to defer to one another and to consider one another as more significant than myself... it's harder than I deemed it at the beginning. Dying to self daily.

But God is gracious and His mercies are new every day, to enable me to battle. This is what makes it freeing. Freeing in the fact that stuff will all pass away but the love of Christ and the gospel proclaimed verbally or through my actions will be what remains. The gospel of Jesus Christ, his sacrificial love, his humility in leaving his throne above, to come to earth, be born of a woman, grow from infancy, be subject to human, fallible parents, and ultimately to be humiliated and crucified by those he came to save, his enemies. This is the love that needs to be seen through this engagement period.. and this is the sobermindedness that I need to be reminded of daily. This is what frees me from the binding, paralyzing STUFF that is entailed in wedding planning.

:D Engagement is a good place for me to be in. God's mercy in revealing more and more of my sin to me... and more and more of my need for the Cross.