reProposal

The reProposal

 “RE”: the word {ok prefix} the Lord gave me for this year. 

As I was praying for a word for my new year I heard Him say “RE” and I kept waiting for a full word but  all I got was “RE”. I felt a little jilted, boy, was I wrong . Over the next few days and weeks  He  whispered a sweet running list of words starting with "Re". ReDeemed, ReTurn,ReBorn, Reclaimed,  ReStore, ReDo, ReLearn, ReGrow, ReCover, ReWedding……..you get the gist. He said it is the year of  Redemption and ReTurn: everything we had done outside of His will would be redeemed and everything that was ever stolen or wrongly given away will be returned.  


It has been 7 years since Micah and I met the Lord and hid this marriage under His covenant to heal. 7 years that He has been working a miracle. It was 7 years before that we got legally married,  this is the year that we get to celebrate the fruit of the journey we have been on, and to redeem that day in the courthouse.

                                                       

 <REWIND>

The first time I saw Micah I knew  was going to marry him- and all I could see was the back of him…….

    On Feburary 19, 1994 I walked into the kitchen of the restaurant  where I was working  and I saw the back of this guy standing at the giant mixer. I knew right then, it was so weird. He had a chef hat on, long red hair 1/2 way down his back and crazy purple patchwork pants- I knew that was MY man. The girl next to me (who had seen the front of him) said “ Check out that guy, I’m gonna go ask him out” and I said “ You can go do that but I am gonna marry him.” I didn’t even really know how those words were coming out of my mouth but they were.  I made up an excuse to walk to the back of the kitchen so I could see the front of him - he says he knew even then that I would never have gone that far into a kitchen except to peek at him. Still true today. The managers of  the two mall restaurants ( he was in our kitchen borrowing the mixer cuz the other restaurant’s wasn’t working) apparently then talked on the phone and set us up on a double blind date for the next day. Both managers told us to meet them at the restaurant bar before our shifts started so they could talk to us.  After a while of awkwardness and getting clued in by the other employees staring at us and giggling, we figured out we were actually there to meet each other. He remembers that I didn’t offer him any of my milkshake and I remember knowing that something Big was happening. We decide to meet up at after work and we started dating.

  The very first time we were “married”, a nurse at general hospital married us. We had been dating about 4 months when Micah had an accident with a table saw that left him without a 1/3 of his thumb. I got a call telling me to come to the hospital- thankfully I was not there to see it happen. By the time I got there visiting hours were over and the nurse said that I couldn’t come in unless I was his wife. “She’s my wife” he said, “Yeah, I’m his wife,” I returned and we were “married.” From then on we considered ourselves married and we saw no reason to make it any more legal then that.  The nurse did the proposing and Micah was the one in the gown.

{We were talking recently about how weird that was  that we  were so quick to “marry”. I said to him, “I was so desperate for someone to love me and not leave me, how pathetic was that?" He said “I was so desperate for that, I cut my finger off. That’s even more pathetic!”}

Us with our friend's son Josh, about a month before we got married.

 On March 17, 1997 the pressure was building for us to get legally married. I mean we were 8 1/2 months pregnant - the grandmothers were FREAKING out! So we called our parents and said to meet us at the courthouse. If my dad could have gotten a shotgun past the security he would have- just for the joke of it (sort of). It was not really a joyful occasion; nobody even took off their coats. Micah did have his favorite pot T-shirt on though- so, he  was dressed up. We asked the judge if we could make some modifications to the legal ceremony to make it more “us”. We went into his chambers and told him the things we didn’t want him to say.  We asked him to take out a bunch of stuff I don’t even remember and all mention of God- we told him we didn’t worship the “American God/Jesus made in America’s own image”- and we didn’t want that included in our marriage.  He said “I have to say a certain number of words to even make this legal, I can’t cut everything” and looked at us like we were crazy. He looked at us with a mix of disbelief, suspect, sadness and probably with a foreknowledge of the coming doom.  He must have known that even though we were signing marriage papers it was really divorce and devastation that was surly to come of this.

We spent the next 7 years living out what happens when you ask God to stay out of your marriage. Then in May of 2004, in the center of the mess we had made & at the end of a broken marriage, Jesus stepped in and intervened.

We are going to invite the Judge to the reWedding.

 <FORWARD>

       7 years after we surrendered our marriage and lives to Jesus we are no longer simply under the covenant of “I don’t like you and you don’t like me, but we both just gave our lives to Jesus and He hates divorce, so we’ll just see what He can do with this mess”. He has taken that choice to trust Him and been so faithful with it. It has been a long road, if anyone had told us that day that it would take YEARS before we would say “ we are in a good place- our marriage is healthy and growing” we probably wouldn’t have chosen it. Thankfully though, He does not give us all the information He has. And here we are- in the year we get to celebrate the redemption and restoration of our marriage.

   On Dec 12, 2010 our family went to our small group. The Lord has given us such a rich community of people who love us and have watched as He has changed us. We had left this small group when the Lord had called us out of New Song 2 years before and rejoiced when He told us it was time to come home to them. When every thing was done and we were about to leave Micah said he had something he wanted to share with everyone so we all regathered in the living room. He started talking about how we had been in prayer about if we should sell our house or not. We had heard the Lord say a year earlier “Move, your season of seclusion is over” and so we thought He meant to move, sell the house and get out of the countryside where we are pretty secluded.

We had spent a year trying to be obedient to what we thought we heard. We “laid it on the altar”, we love our home and where we live but if He had another place for us to be we would rather be there, in His will, then in any house we loved.

 We hadn’t realized that the “season of seclusion” was the season away from our church home for His purpose, and he was telling us to go back to New Song. So, even though we had been asking when we could go home, when He told us we could we missed it. HH HHowever, He also explained the “season of seclusion”  included the years we had secluded ourselves even within our community.  We had moved out there to be secluded over 10 years before. We were not living a life that you would want lived out in other people’s view.  Then after we met the Lord He had kept secluded as He hid us under His wing and healed us.  As we prayed through this we caught a fuller picture of how secluded we had been, even in the establishment of our marriage. We had joined in private in a courthouse, joined not for the Lord in covenant and celebration but hidden and hurried, with every one's coats still on.

  It was time to have a wedding!
 We have talked about it off and on but never thought it was time – “still work to be done”, was our mindset. We wanted to be in a place to celebrate the amazing work the Lord has blessed us with by remaking our marriage. Not that we thought everything would ever be perfect, we know that will never be on this earth, but in a place of significant and stable redefinition. We are there! This is the year! We are going to redo all the parts we did wrong the first time. There was no asking of my father’s blessing, no proposal, no planning, no dreaming, no dress, no coming together to publicly celebrate our love and most importantly no honoring of God and giving of a marriage to Him.  This time we are going to do it right.

  What I didn’t figure in was the “no ring” part- but Micah did. Micah took Adi with him to pick out a ring for me. They chose a 3 diamond setting. I love that! 3 always honors the Trinity and it is a symbol of the yesterdays, today and tomorrows we will have- a diamond for each. I didn’t know what they were doing except having a day together. Their day was a trip to the jewelry store with a stop at my parent’s house on the way home. Micah asked my dad to speak to him alone. He apologized for the way we had first gotten married, how he had not honored him by asking his blessing, how he had robbed my dad of the chance to walk his daughter down the isle, how we were and who we were when we did this the first time. He asked him if he could do it right this time… My dad was so honored by that. It was a big wounding we had inflicted on our families, my dad had always dreamed of walking me down the isle. I am his only daughter. We had taken that dream from him. He was touched that we are going to give it back. I have never felt more honored then when I found this out, that I was worthy of asking and receiving a blessing for- was very healing to me.    

    So that night as life group was ending  Micah had something to share with the group.  Since we had come early to pray with our leaders about how we felt the Lord was saying not to sell our house. (They had been getting the same thing about the situation. So we felt very released from that call.) I thought he was going to share that with the group, they had all been praying with us about this for months. He started talking about our “season of seclusion” and I was chiming in here and there (as I do) and at one point I saw Lori (our sweet friend and LG leader) trying to get my attention, she was giving me the “shut up and let him talk” look. And so I looked  over at him and realized he was not talking only about the house- he was PROPOSING! He nervously ( how great is that!) pulled out a ring box and asked me to remarry him.

Lori had already pulled out her camera and was taking pictures. A camera that had totally run out of batteries that morning was amazingly able to take the sweetest pictures of this moment.

And so, here we go- redoing it all!