One year- also, a lifetime.

New Years Day 2012, you'd think there should've been snow on the ground, but New York managed to be freezing without. My favorite person in the world casually (or so I thought) suggests we sit down on an unassuming Central Park bench. You know, the kind that's dedicated to the loving memory of someone who used to loved sitting on park benches in Central Park.

We had both been feeling the weight of the evening approaching. When we'd kiss each other good bye at the JFK airport, unsure of how and when we'll be together again.It was the toughest time, in our approaching three years together. Not knowing where we'll be together again. USA? South Africa? Back in Vietnam? Oman? This year, next year...

I was so preoccupied with how to make these last few hours count that I hardly saw Ben's next move coming. A move he's been thinking about for months and months and years if you want to count that. He proposed. I'm not sure if it was seconds or minutes or a lifetime that hung in the suspense of the question leaving his heart and the 'yes' that I finally managed to get out.

Becoming this man's wife was exactly what I was supposed to do, and ten months later out in the fields with roosters crowing in the background, rain clouds holding their breath in the air and a handful of the best people we knew witnessing, I did.

What I wasn't sure of was how it was all going to come together, on that dedicated Central Park bench, I had no idea.

Yesterday marked our first year of marriage. We can't decide if it has felt like a year or felt like just the other day. I guess it feels like both. I thought a lot about how thankful I am for this man, how happy he makes me, how I find myself more in love with him today than a year ago in the open fields, or a few years ago in the crazy streets of Hanoi.

Through all the love and thankfulness and looking forward to our first non-whole30 meal I was vividly reminded of the promises of God. The ones He gave me as a young teenage girl thinking about the kind of husband she wants, the ones I held onto in some crazy twenty something years and then the ones from those early engagement days. The promise that He will make the way, that I can trust Him, that He will not fail, just like He has never failed before. I really needed to be reminded of this, so that (trusting) in some time I look back on these weird days, and say, I had no idea what I supposed to do, but He showed me the way. Starting over in America is no joke sometimes.



This guy, I go where he goes.