Engagement Night…The Story Told

8 years ago tonight, the love of my life proposed and as they say...the rest is history. It was SO romantic and took me completely by surprise. Let me take you back a few years:)

I was going to see my close friend, Lisa, give her testimony to the youth group at her church (where Mark was one of the youth pastors). I was watching two little boys at the time and had to bring them with me. When I walked into the church, Mark told Curt "That is the kind of woman that I want to marry," (but at the time he thought the boys were mine and wasn't ready to have kids)! I was introduced to him that night and thought that he was SO handsome and had a great personality, not to mention that he was great with the youth. I never thought I would see him again, so we went on our way. Then in May we met again at a family bbq with the families that we were staying with in Kansas. We immediately hit it off and of course Mark was the life of the party! To make a long story short, we went out quite a few times that summer and the more that we were together, the more fun we had. There was definitely a strong connection between the two of us. We ended up having "the conversation" about what the future meant for us, and after some deep soul searching on both our parts, and much prayer, we decided to see where this adventure would lead us. Well...after a short time, it was apparent that we were meant to be together. A little while later, we set a date to be married the next December and were going to get engaged in June.

So, fast forward to March (my birthday). The couple of weeks leading up to my birthday, Mark kept saying how short of money he was and felt bad that he couldn't get me something big for my birthday. I insisted that all I wanted was dinner and time together and that would be the perfect gift. As my birthday got closer, Mark was just acting.....off! I couldn't put my finger on anything specific, except that he was stressed about money. He said that I "might" want to get dressed up because he had a surprise for me. So, we went for dinner and then went down to the Plaza, a romantic place where the college sweethearts went. We walked down to Starbucks, got some drinks, and sat down at the park bench. At one point, he told me to watch down the street at the corner and my surprise was going to be coming soon. Sure enough, around the corner came a horse and buggy! This is something I ALWAYS wanted to do. I turned around excited to ask him if that was my surprise, and there he was on his knee with a beautiful ring in a box opened up and he asked me to marry him. The rest is a blur of excitement, tears, kisses, hugs and phone calls. Needless to say, we missed the carriage ride!

8 years later, here we are even more in love and have a fabulous life together. Mark is my best friend and the one person that I always love spending time with (Kaley comes in a close second.) He is my source of strength, inspiration and the one who can always make me laugh. We are incredibly blessed at the life that God has given us and we are truly thankful. Nothing like a birthday to remember the good things in life:)

Here we are on our special night: