My Engagement Story – What I Learned About Leaving and Cleaving
What can engagement teach you about marriage and personal growth?
I remember that evening, bounding into my mom’s house late in the night.
It was a dark African night.
A few brave stars twinkled down, seemingly singing along with the sparkling new ring on my middle finger.
I had it all planned out in my head – the squeals, the thrill, the joy, the smiles and congratulations upon sharing with my family about my engagement.
The engagement
Walking in the streets of Nairobi, the Kenyan capital on a breezy Christmas Eve, I had not expected my fiance to suddenly pull me into one of the expensive hotels of the city.
“Oh let’s just ride up the elevators, see what’s up there!” He countered my resistance.
He knew me well – knew that I didn’t like rabbit trails. Or looking silly.
But minutes later, I was inside the hotel.
But instead of a long ride up, he took me to the pool area.
Where he proposed.
With a poem and a ring.
And an empty pool, with no lights.
The hotel had decided to clean the pool that day.
But it was perfect for me.
After the engagement
Later that evening, I waltzed into my mom’s house to break the life-changing news. But my mother was perplexed by my ring.
“Does that mean you are married?”
My mum, in her days rings were reserved for marriage vows not engagement.
There were no squeals from my sisters either.
They looked at me, hesitant and reserved, wondering what in the world I had just done.
And I stood there waiting for someone to jump up and squeal.
In all my dreaming, I had never imagined being required to explain my engagement to my family.
And down the line I’d also remember how it never crossed my mind on that Christmas Eve, that I was announcing an engagement ten months after loosing our dad.
And that I was the first girl in our family to walk down the aisle.
The messy part of leaving and cleaving
Now I see that evening for what it was.
The beginning of leaving.
In preparation for the journey of cleaving.
Being the one that was doing the leaving, I did not understand or comprehend the weight of “being left”.
I was heading out of the door and I wanted a great send off!
A few into marriage you’d think I’ve learned better.
But I haven’t.
In moments of stretch, I still expect others to feel my pain and extend more grace than I am willing to give give in their time of need.
Personal growth can be messy but I still act as if it’s only messy for me.
“Embrace the mess!”
My friend Beth Steffaniak of Messy Marriage blog says,
“It wasn’t until I realized how God was using “hardships” as refining tools in my life….”
More and more I am learning to embrace messy growth seasons, not as an excuse or a crutch, but as an opportunity for deeper growth.
I am learning to forgive myself when I don’t measure up. Like many people, it’s easy to forgive others but not myself.
As for my family and I, we began to learn some important lessons that day.
Like, you don’t have to understand everything in order to release.
And love and trust will smoothen the bumpiest of rides.
My family is big fans of my husband and I. So yes, small bumps don’t mean a lifetime of heartache. When both sides are willing, the bumps can lead to amazing growth.
How about you, have an engagement story to tell? : ) Any pre-wedding lessons that have carried over into marriage?
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That is so hard to imagine as a person born and raised in Southern California (where squealing is natural part of the engagement process :). The lessons I learned that carried over into my marriage are too many to list. We went through premarital counseling for 12 weeks and it was the best decision ever! We talked about everything from finances to children to relocating; everything. It helped us to think through various challenges we might face in our future and how to deal with them in such a way that it strengthens -not weakens- our marriage. It has been such a blessing because we’ve only come across one issue in our 10 years of marriage that we hadn’t talked about before we said I do. Not bad, eh?
Thank you for sharing. Your honesty is refreshing. It actually didn’t bring to mind my own engagement story (boy is it crazy- in a “I needed a swift kick in the butt” kind of way) but it brought to mind when my son was born.
my dad didn’t live long enough to meet him. That was and is bitter sweet. Some day in heaven they will meet.
I would love to hear your story TC! 🙂
That must be bitter sweet. thank God for the someday in heaven…
i think about the milestones my dad has missed., i was actually thinking about one last week. thank God for someday. I love love your post this week, http://tcavey.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-joy-before-him.html when we look at things from eternity point of view, we can have joy!
Lovely post. I enjoyed reading this as i could completely relate, coming from a Ghanaian background. My fiance asked me to marry him without a ring. It felt weird having to explain it to my American friends and even some Ghanaian friends why I was engaged but didn’t have a ring. I’m still determined to keep things traditional but all the explaining has taken the fun out of the announcement – expecially after all the squealing of “let me see the ring” turns into “where is the ring?” Lol, I’m a new follower. I love your blog.
Nicole, Lol I feel you! I can almost see the squeals-to-questions transition…takes take the fun out of the thrill doesn’t it! Glad you have held up well and taking it all in stride! Thanks so much for dropping in!
You’re welcome. I’m here to stay:)
Lovely post. Yes indeed, marriage can be messy. But God knows that nothing makes us grow quite like challenge.
My engagement was short. Too short. My family was happy for me, but I wish we’d taken more time to merge our families. That would have helped our first year of transition.
We don’t always appreciate the challenges, but true, that’s when we grow the most! Thank you for sharing J
First of all, I’m so honored to be mentioned here, Ngina. Who knew I could be “quote-worthy”? ha! But your story brings up such an important point that is made more obvious by the way your mother responded. We must “leave” before cleaving and that doesn’t always take place just because we get engaged or married, but because we choose to leave in all sorts of ways. I love your words, “You don’t have to understand everything to release.” In fact, I think that can be a more beautiful and wholehearted surrender when we choose to take that faith risk in our spouses and in our God. Great story and message, my friend!
You are so very “quote-worthy” Beth! You have so much wisdom and encouragement. i love what you’ve said about choice. It’s truly a choice and it happens in all sorts of ways! Thank you for adding this perspective.
We are more and more alike each day, Ngina.
My perspective upon our engagement was “me” centered to the extent I didn’t have a concept of other people’s feelings at all. From a 5-year old brother to my 40-something parents, I assumed they felt joy. I never estimated the sadness and loss when my happiness factored larger in my own mind.
It helps to understand that I did not have a good focus on God, with human want presiding, instead. We invited God into the church for the ceremony, but then we left him there, as if His only purpose lay in sealing the deal.
Several years later, I began to invite God into our lives. It wasn’t until I made the overtures in faith that my eyes opened, little by little, to the self-centeredness I exhibited. We can ask forgiveness for past offenses, and he does forgive. Sometimes, it takes a long period of time to understand that an offense occurred at all, but He does show us.
Amy seems like you and I are cut from the same cloth! 🙂 Thank you for sharing your journey. It’s an encouragement to me. i love how God matures and makes us wise over time, able to see where we went wrong and helping us do what we can to make things right. We serve a great God!
Ngina, what a beautiful story of your engagement and the lessons from it. It shows me how every perspective is unique. When we learn to appreciate these unique perspectives, we gain empathy and a depth of caring beyond our own limited scope.
So true Skip, I couldn’t have put it better. Thank you so much for stopping by
It’s peculiar how our preconceived notions of things happening in our worlds seldom play out the way we anticipate. Human nature is a funny like that… and I don’t mean “ha-ha.” With time and wisdom god puts things into a better frame of reference for us and our expectations. He never fails us, but we fail Him constantly. Knowing that and forgiving ourselves takes us a long way in how we view other situations… we just need to be reminded every now and then… Thanks for this one, Ngina.
Thank you Floyd, I love how with just a few words, you can summarize an entire post! You are very gifted and a great reader of the heart. I appreciate your thoughts.
Love the story, Ngina. We lost my engagement ring a few days after my husband bought it for me. We were in his car on an icy road, slid into a ditch, and in the midst of helping to push it out, somehow my ring slipped off my finger and into all the snow.
We didn’t discover it til later, decided we needed a metal detector to find it, and bought one (they didn’t rent them in our town), even though we had very little money. We went back to the scene of the accident, and my (now) husband was running the metal detector, looked over to the left, and spotted the ring in the snow. It turned out we didn’t need the detector.
Oh, I forgot to mention, he accidentally ran a red light on the way back to look for the ring. It was an expensive but funny engagement!
This is funny one Barb! (though I am sure it wasn’t funny when you were going through it!). It’s so good to have stories to look back to and laugh about!
Thanks for sharing!
Actually, it was funny at the time, too – just expensive funny. (Kinda like when my husband backed out of the garage before opening the garage door.) 🙂
Ha! That’s very expensive funny!
Beautiful!
Thanks Lance 🙂
Thanks for sharing your story Ngina, it’s beautiful how God works in and through the messy parts of our life.
My father met my wife before I did. He came home that day and told me I should marry her. I laughed it off, until I met her. We got married 9 months later. I learned that my father is wiser than I had thought.
It’s amazing how He works!
Yours is a great story! You have a great dad! Such a good picture of how God our heavenly Father moves in our lives – how He edges us towards the best things, how we resist… until we finally ‘get it’. 🙂
Thank you for sharing.
I truly enjoyed reading this. Inspiring.
Glad you did Jennifer : ) Thanks so much for dropping in and leaving a note