Be Here.

Last weekend I got engaged. I type these words with a beautiful ring on my left hand, thinking back on the best seven days of my life. I won’t recount all the details of that first night word-for-word (trust me, I’ve done that more times than I can count), but here are a few snippets:

Walking into my apartment, surprised to see it filled withcandles and giant flowers.

My favorite boy (and now future husband!) standing by thewindows, waiting for me.

The sincerest question.

A breathless yes, a long hug, and all the people I love themost surrounding us in celebration.

The sweetest night of my life.

What followed was a weekend full of surprise familyappearances, smiling until my cheeks hurt, dizzying excitement, enough champagne,cake, and streamers to last a year, and the kindest hazel eyes looking back atme through it all.

Sometimes it’s hard to even comprehend that it was real.

But real it was, and now my life is set on a new and exciting course I couldn’t have imagined even ten days ago. It seems like each person I talk with has the same questions about date and location that I do. Wedding-related accounts have begun following me on social media by the handful, and I’m staring head-on at the task of moving to a new town, finding a different job, and establishing a new idea of home. It’s enough to make the anxiety-prone, avoider-of-anything-that-has-to-do-with-change person in me go into panic mode.

But for the first six days of our engagement I didn’t. Panic, that is. I wasn’t anxious, I didn’t worry, I wasn’t stressed—it was like I was on a cloud above it all. None of those little details could phase me.

Then day seven happened.

I looked at three different apartments in the span of twelve hours, I got offered a job, I googled “wedding venues,” only to find lists twelve pages long with what I determined were no good options—I got overwhelmed.

That’s when I found myself laying on the couch at 11:30 p.m., struggling to text my fiancé back, unable to move from couch to bed and get the sleep I knew I so desperately needed. In my most anxious moment, I felt like I had purposefully taken a match and lit my life on fire, bursting into flames everything that brought me the stability, comfort, and, most of all, the control I craved like a drug.

To be clear, this wasn’t anxiety spurred on by saying yes tosomething or someone I wasn’t sure about. I’ve never been more sure of adecision than the one I made by saying yes to marrying my fiancé (as cliché asthat sounds). The peace I felt in the six days after we got engaged was a reassuranceof that decision and so much more. It was a time of holy calm that waspalpable, and I knew that peace wasn’t from me.

But the moment on the couch was all me. I had created five minutes of panic that felt like an eternity because, like Peter, I had taken my eyes off of the only one who could ensure that I crossed over the roaring waves of life safely: Jesus. I had been walking on water just fine this whole time, relying on His strength, not my own, but as soon as I glanced toward to-do lists and rent payments and wedding caterers and dress prices instead of focusing on the reasons for everything currently happening in my life (a.k.a. my overwhelming love for my husband-to-be and Jesus), I sank. And I sank hard.  

I took a drink of water, cried a little bit with my roommate/best friend, and went to bed, resolved to deal with these feelings in the morning when I was more levelheaded. But after a restless night of pseudo-sleep, that next morning dawned without a cloud in the sky—the words “be here” ringing in my ears.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in April, be here.

I’m going to a birthday party tonight for one of my favoritecollege professors, be here.

I’m joking around on the phone with my fiancé, be here.

I’m making cookie bars all alone in my apartment, be here.

I’m looking at the sky and thinking this whole wedding thingcan be a fun celebration instead of a stress-inducing list of tasks to checkoff. Please God, let me be here.

I know stressful, hard days will come my way. I’m going tohave to say goodbye to a lot of things in this season, a lot of people who havemade these last two years after college the best of my life. But I’m also goingto have the privilege of saying hello to so many new, amazing, and wonderfulthings.

Finally being in the same place as the boy I love.

Embarking on new projects that I’m passionate about.

Running with the calm assurance that friendships are notsustained by proximity, but instead by hearts aligned and intentions made.

It’s going to be crazy and wonderful and messy all at the same time, but I want to be here for all of it. That’s my prayer, just to be here in this season, to return again and again to the girl who keeps her eyes on Jesus, instead of the waves beneath her. And to know, without a doubt, that God works good in all things for those who love Him. Because that love, really, is the only thing that is able to hold us fast through the many storms, joys, triumphs, challenges, and changes life brings.

words by Kaylyn Deiter and photo by Sarah Mohan