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Hello,
I’m writing to let you know that Mitch and I did get married on June 12th! WE MADE IT! And those three little words right there did not come easy. As a young girl, I grew up imagining the day I’d walk down the aisle in my pretty white dress. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined it to be so hard to get to that point.
At the new year, Mitch and I sat in Omaha, Nebraska talking about what was to come. We knew that it was going to be a challenging engagement as he was entering his busiest work season and I was facing my second back surgery (2/19/20). But we made it through that. By the beginning of March, I was beginning my recovery and he was finishing up his 70+ hour work weeks. Then the pandemic hit us all like a freight train. But God…sustained us with every hit we took.
I am certain I’ve never been on an emotional rollercoaster quite like what I experienced leading up to our wedding. I would spend hours researching and planning an element of the weekend and then it would be gone. It would either get canceled or need to be reworked. And that happened again and again. By the time we actually reached June, I didn’t trust any plan and had stopped updating people because things kept changing so fast. It was a logistical nightmare and I couldn’t hear that “it’d all work out and be amazing” from anyone anymore.
The whole time Mitch and I kept saying that as long as we have each other and can get an officiant and our immediate families there we would do the ceremony. But even that proved difficult as I learned my nieces and nephews wouldn’t be able to come if we kept the ceremony in California. I could deal with changing my vision for the wedding on anything other than my family. But their attendance was a must. So we reworked the whole ceremony three weeks before and moved it to Colorado. A direct flight for us and Mitch’s family and a doable drive for mine. I always said just our families and the mountains. I just never would have thought moving it to another state 🙂 Now that introduced a whole new level of stress, but the pain of re-planning will fade. The memory of the people we love most being there will last forever.
With a new location and our pastor willing to fly out for the day, we were ready to make this wedding happen. But then…the floor dropped out from under me again. On Monday, June 1st my sister (who has always been my person) went in for a routine, minor surgery at an outpatient surgery center. But she didn’t wake up and was quickly taken via ambulance to a hospital and placed in the ICU. I was wrecked. All of the wedding planning quickly was pushed aside as I went to battle for her in prayer. It wasn’t until late in the week that she began to remember conversations and slowly start her recovery. She did NOT want to miss my wedding and knew that I had already fought so hard for it. I, of course, couldn’t have imagined the day without her, but also knew that her health was exponentially more important. On Sunday, June 7th she was released after spending six days in the ICU. On that Wednesday, by the grace of God, she was able to travel with my parents to Colorado for the wedding.
Now you’d think that by this point things couldn’t get worse…but it was stressful up until the minute we said “I do”. I had planned for Mitch and I to go and look at spots for the ceremony the day before, but wrong turns and appointments lasting longer than expected led us to not even have enough time to find a spot. As I sat in our rental car the day before the wedding, I was crying. Mad and frustrated that even this last element was out of my control. Thankfully though our photographer scoped out everything and found us the most beautiful location in the national forest.
Mid-afternoon on Friday, June 12th, we loaded the families up and were on our way to the ceremony. But then…Mitch got word from our pastor that the road he needed to take was closed because of an accident. Now we only had about a two hour window from the time he landed, drove to the mountains, and then for him to leave to catch his return flight. Talk about even more stress! As I was standing to the side of our ceremony spot (hiding from Mitch so he wouldn’t see me before), I had no idea what we were going to do if he couldn’t make it. But one of our videographers kindly reminded me that I do believe in the sovereignty of God. That’s pretty much the only thing that has remained constant throughout this entire process. With that peace, I took a deep breath. Moments later our pastor pulled up and we were able to make this hard fought for ceremony happen. WE GOT MARRIED!
I can’t thank you all enough for your prayers and messages during this crazy time! I know I’m personally behind on responding, but do know that I’ve read every one of them. I just took a long moment to breathe and de-stress after our wedding. A big part of that relaxation was our honeymoon! We are very pleased to report that we were able to go to Sandals in Jamaica. It only took five different versions of our travel plans, but a honeymoon happened!
Now for some plans looking forward, we are moving ahead with our August 8th date for the reception. We have confirmed with our venue that we’re OK to have our event as planned. We’ll send more details on that front later this week.
When it comes to the wedding ceremony details (and pretty pictures), we’re going to hold off on sharing until after the reception. We hope you will understand and respect this as we do want to preserve the original vision for the reception even with having to move the date from June to August. I’m still going to wear my dress. Mitch and I very much look forward to sharing our wedding with you in person. A whole night to celebrate together!
That’s quite a long update, isn’t it?! Can you believe that’s just the higher level things that happened? Not even the medium to little things that we had to navigate…BUT we made it. By the grace of God, I got to marry the man I love and am now his wife 🙂
Sincerely,
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