how we got engaged. « walking by faith

how we got engaged.

Our engagement story, written a few days after I said “yes”:

At 6:45pm on Saturday, April 7, 2007, Brian Kiley asked me to marry him.

I’ll tell you the story, but first, some facts you must know: Brian was involved in 45 phone conversations between noon and 5:30pm on Saturday in order to make the proposal happen – it was on the brink of being called off at any minute that day; he had been out of the country for nearly 2 weeks – South America for 5 days, back home in Oceanside for 3, and then in Mexico for 7 – before the proposal took place; being out of the country made it tough for him to make reservations for fun things, so he had to recruit some college-aged accomplices from his ministry to take care of business; and being out of the country made it extremely difficult for him to reach my dad, whom he was finally able to get in touch with and was granted permission about 2 hours before the proposal adventure began. Talk about a crazy day . . .

I called Brian around 2:45pm right after I finished working at the gym on Saturday. He said he was still driving the jam-packed Ford Expedition back from Mexico and that they were about an hour away from the church (Lie #1: in reality, they had actually arrived back to Oceanside nearly 3 hours earlier). He told me that we could hang out after they got back to the church around 4:00, but that at 6:00, he had to be at the church in order to get his car back from the woman whose Expedition he had swapped for the week, and then he was going to want to go home afterward and go to sleep since he was exhausted (Lie #2: actually, there was no such 6:00 meeting scheduled. He was, however, truthfully exhausted). Deal.

At 4:00, he called me and asked what my status was, to which I replied that I was about a mile from the church. He said he was upstairs in his office checking his e-mail, so I could just come up and meet him, which is what I normally do when I go visit him at the church (Lie #3: he had actually left the church 15 minutes earlier and was sitting in the parking lot of a grocery store when he called me). Cool, no problem. I got to the church a minute later and went upstairs, and what did my eyes behold but an empty office. No Brian to be found anywhere. After looking through the office window, peeking around the corner to the next room, and then peering in the window again, I decided to open the door and go inside. It wasn’t until then that I noticed the black Georgiou dress that was hanging in a bag on the door, and the 8 1/2″x 11″ piece of paper taped to it. My eyes were immediately drawn to the black & white picture of Brian and I at the bottom of the paper, and then I began to read the poem that filled the top 3/4 of the page:

Dear Christie,

For over three years now you’ve been my dear
You may be surprised to find that I am not here

You might have expected to find me a mess
But instead you’ll see this nifty black dress

Go back to your place and there yourself fix
And I’ll be there to meet you, not a minute past six

Our plans for the night, they are quite grand
I’m excited to see your silly face, and hold your hand

I missed you a lot, this much is true
And I can’t wait to look into your eyes and say, “I love you.”

Hehehe . . .

Love,
Brian
April 7, 2007

It was then that I thought to myself, “We’re getting engaged tonight!” It felt like something out of a movie, where the lead actress is mysteriously left an expensive dress that magically fits her every curve perfectly, and she is instructed to put it on and meet her impending romance at a specific time and location later that night. It was amazing. After glancing at my watch and noticing that I now had an hour and 45 minutes until the appointed time, I grabbed the dress and the note and hurried downstairs. I was kind of annoyed that I had driven eight miles to the church and was now having to drive back home in a matter of minutes.

Nonetheless, I excitedly called two friends as soon as I exited the church parking lot and then embarked on the longest ten minute drive of my life down the 5 South. I was giddy. Fully giddy. I felt like I was going to explode with excitement, and was bummed to come home to an empty apartment. I wouldn’t even be able to tell my roommates? Man. What was I going to do with myself for an hour and a half? All I had to do was put on the fancy black dress that was made out of silk and beads, and do my hair. I tried to listen to music but it made me more antsy. I made some black tea to try and combat the effects of 8am practice that morning, but it made me jittery, so I poured it down the drain. At 5:45, I decided to throw on another coat of nail polish to cover up the chipping that had taken place in the past two days, and my hands were shaking. “Why am I so nervous?” I thought to myself. “Brian’s the one proposing!” Finally, at 5:55, I stood in the kitchen in my strappy black high heels and peeked through the blinds, anticipating Brian’s momentary arrival. 5:57. 5:59. 6:01. 6:03. Where is he? The note said not a minute past six. “Not a minute past six, eh? ,” read my giddy, nervous text message. 6:05. Here he comes up the stairs. Knock on the door. Big smile and hug hello after a week apart. He was all dressed up too.

We walked downstairs to what I thought was going to be his car parked on the street. Waiting for us at the front entrance to my apartment was a white limousine! Walking hand in hand, I looked up at him and said, “Are you serious?!?!?!” He just smirked and looked straight ahead. Once we were ushered into our seats, the journey began.

The limo driver literally drove around in circles for a half an hour. We got on and off freeways, went down familiar streets, got back on freeways (with me guessing aloud the entire time where I suspected we might be going, and Brian playing with all of the knobs and buttons in our fancy escort), and then finally exited onto Oceanside Harbor Drive at around 6:30. The sun should have started to set by then, but the overcast weather prevented any color from penetrating the stratosphere. Oh well. After driving down a windy, narrow, alley-like street, we stepped out of the limo and went down a walkway that had the harbor on the left and a nice hotel/villa residence on the right, where people were standing around, drinking, smoking, and watching the water in casual attire. Keep in mind that we were really dressed up, so we stood out like a sore thumb and everyone was watching us. As we continued down the path, I noticed that there was a white gazebo up the way, and I could tell that it was decorated. I instantly knew that was where we were headed.

The gazebo looked amazing. A white sheet was laid on the ground, covered in reddish-pink rose petals. There was a chair, a glass bowl of water, and some really fancy hand towels that had been neatly arranged in the center of it all. Once we stepped into the gazebo, Brian told me to sit down and take off my shoes. After following his instructions, he knelt down and washed my feet, saying all sorts of Biblical things about how Jesus washed His disciples’ feet as an act of love and service, and how he wanted to spend his life learning how to live in love and service to me. He then told me he had something for me, reached under the chair, and asked me to stand up. In his hands he held a Bible. He asked, “Do you remember what the first chapter of scripture we memorized together was?” I replied, “Yeah, it was 1 Corinthians 13, right?” “Yes,” he answered, “I want to read it to you.” He read the chapter about Love that we had memorized together over three and a half years ago, added a little bit of commentary at the end, and then said, “When I ordered the Bible, I told them exactly how to spell your name, but they kind of screwed it up, I hope that’s okay.” He turned the Bible around so I could see, and engraved on the front, in gold letters, read the name “Christie Kiley.” His last name. It melted my heart.

He returned the Bible back to its place under the chair, grabbed the ring box, stood in front of me and looked me in the eyes, and then got down on one knee. It was surreal. In no more than two or three sentences, he asked me to marry him. I was determined to remember every single word he said so that I could share it with you all, but alas, all I can remember is, “Christie Tedmon, will you marry me?” I said, “Yes,” he stood up, and we hugged and kissed. As soon as we stood and embraced, I heard exuberant cheering, clapping, and whistling coming from behind me. “I don’t want to look,” I told Brian, “but are those people we know, or are they random people?” “They’re random people,” he answered. It was so cool.

As we continued to hug, I also noticed that there was a tree about 20 feet away from us, and peeking between its arms was our friend Dan Keith, who had been video taping the whole time. I yelled, “Dan Keith!?” and then he and our other friend Louie, who had been taking still pictures the whole time, came out from their hiding place and came to give us hugs and congratulations. We took a few pictures, and then headed back down the walkway to the limo, where the formerly random people now congratulated us as we passed them for a second time. Once in the limo, we took a few minutes to pray and surrender our period of engagement to God, asking for his grace during an almost certain time of stress.

The limo took us to dinner at a nice restaurant across the street from the beach (and 3 blocks from my apartment), where we enjoyed some time laughing and dreaming about the future together, and filling each other in on our respective versions of the story. We called Dan at the end of dinner and asked if he’d be able to come over to my apartment later and show us the footage he took of the proposal. When we got back to my apartment, amidst the unchecked boxes on the organized to-do list that I had written on our communal whiteboard, my roommate Beth had written, “Get Engaged” with a smiley face and a proud check-mark in the box next to it. It was so cute! An hour or so later, Dan showed up with an edited rough cut DVD of the proposal. He had included a title at the beginning that read, “The Proposal” in fancy lettering, and he even put the whole thing to music and included artistic shots that he had taken of the harbor and gazebo. We were amazed. Though the three-minute video made Brian and I tear up, it was the “outtakes” that made us start singing Dan’s praises. He and Louie had recorded some stuff while they were waiting for us to show up at the gazebo that made us laugh harder than we had in a long time. It was amazingly funny.

Pretty much our whole church knew that the proposal was going to be happening that Saturday night, so when we got to the church the next morning, everybody was so excited to see us and congratulate us. Brian always gives the announcements to conclude our church’s weekly young adult venue service, but he didn’t want to detract from the importance of Easter morning by having people focus on our new engagement, so he took the liberty of adding an extra announcement at the very end that went something like this: “And one more announcement. You may notice that my . . . [three-second pause] FIANCE [cue the band going crazy, especially the drummer, while everybody cheers] . . . is wearing a new piece of jewelry on her left hand.” Everybody cheered even louder. As I was sitting there in the front row, I could feel the applause and cheers of 150 people warming my soul. It was incredible. Brian was smiling proudly on-stage with microphone in hand, looking me straight in the eyes, while everybody in the room was cheering for us. I haven’t smiled that big in a long time. On Easter Sunday, the day where everybody shows up to church, we got to share the story of our engagement and received the congratulations of friends and strangers alike.

I had been praying about this day for the past two months, asking that God would help all of Brian’s plans to work out, in spite of my tendencies to be moody and to try and know everything that’s going on. I had told Brian on multiple occasions that it would be impossible to surprise me, since I tend to be hyperobservant and swear that I was supposed to be a CIA agent, so all he wanted was that the beginning of the night would be a surprise. He just wanted me to believe that I was actually going to be meeting him at the church at 4:00 that day. I believed him. He succeeded. I was fooled. I was also fully surprised at the sight of the limo. He succeeded again.

Thanks to Trisha, who helped Brian immensely with getting the ring. It’s perfect. Thanks to Janine, who supplied the amazing black dress that fit me like it was my own. Thanks to Dan and Daniel, who took care of business for Brian while he was in Mexico. Thanks to Louie, who brainstormed proposal ideas with Brian while riding shotgun with him in Mexico. Thanks to Beth for continuing the celebration with the clever engagement checklist on the whiteboard. Thanks to Mackenzee for dropping her plans to come over and watch the video and celebrate with us, and who has already told me that she will faithfully hum, “Dum, dum, dum dum . . .” every time I pass her in the gym from now until September. And all praise to God, who has brought us this far and will surely walk beside us and provide for us in every way during these five months of engagement. Did I mention that we’re planning on getting married on September 8th this year?

I hope you enjoyed this version of our engagement weekend. Please keep us in prayer as we embark on this new journey together. Thanks!