To a Girl Engaged

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Dear Maggie,*

Last May, Jared and I found ourselves in that funny place of not-yet-being-engaged but knowing we would be pretty soon, if know what I mean. It’s a gentle transition you don’t necessarily talk about, but that’s written all over a girl’s face and obvious in the things she starts buying: dishes, for example. 

When I came down to Arkansas for a week’s visit, our activities turned from offhand dates at coffee-shop-bookstores to spending our free evenings in the house his grandparents could no longer live in, cleaning it out. We knew this home would be ours, and we had to get a head-start even before the ring came out of the box. 

Those evenings were some of my favorites from all our months together. I think it was because I’d traversed the forest of Is he the one? and come out on the other side, where the landscape was clear and beautiful. He was the one, and this was the house, and there was carpet to rip out. We blew dead leaves out of the flower beds, trimmed bushes and hauled them to the burn pile, and tried to swing dance to Louis Armstrong while we swept out the garage thick with summer dust.

One night after we’d finished working, I scooted two wicker chairs together on the back porch and took Jared by the hand to have a seat. The sky fell into a deep blue as the sun dipped behind the trees, and for the first time, it didn’t matter that the porch beds were still cluttered with lawn ornaments, or the heavy drapes inside too dated, or the house just so much bigger and more elegant than I ever dreamed my first one would be. I felt content just sitting on the porch of what would be.

After we got engaged, I remember explaining to Jared about the instinct a pregnant woman feels right before she gives birth, called nesting. I felt something akin to it, not for birth, but for marriage and making a home. When I told a friend that I had the strange and sudden urge to pick up knitting just a month before our wedding, she said, “Of course you do. You just want to do something homey.” When a mother “nests,” she acts with a sort of contended restlessness, waiting on the baby to arrive while scrubbing her kitchen and folding blankets as if it were already here. It’s a living forward, I suppose, in expectation of the reality that will come.

Sometimes, Maggie, I don’t think young women realize this is a good thing.

There’s a mother house sparrow who’s built a nest in the schoolhouse light over our front door. You wouldn’t look at her—foraging for twigs, scratching for worms, building a bed—and accuse her of being discontent. She isn’t groveling in a fantasy that will never belong to her; she’s breaking ground on the reality that will hatch in a few weeks. 

As a girl engaged, the Lord had to shepherd me to the place where longing met contentment—where I could sit on the porch of a house not yet finished; wear a ring and not yet be married. Long before Jared came along, I’d heard an older woman wisely say that if Jesus didn’t satisfy you as a single, He won’t satisfy you when you’re married. It turns out that if He doesn’t satisfy you when you’re dating, He won’t when you’re engaged, or when you’re a bride, or (I imagine) the mother of many children. 

“A soul that is capable of God can be filled with nothing else but God,” wrote Jeremiah Burroughs in The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (which I still haven’t finished, but was a wonderful book for engagement).

“For I have learned,” wrote Paul, “in whatever situation I am, to be content.  I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Phil. 4:11-12).

The secret, of course, is Christ who strengthens me.

Engagement is a season of plenty, Maggie. You will never again know anything like it, when everything in the world is so charged. The only thing better is marriage itself, and that’s why it isn’t too early to start building the nest. Batten the hatches. Buy sets of dishes (thrift them if you can; it’s more fun!). Just don’t get so ahead of the Builder that, for now, you can’t sit content on the porch of what will be.

Your sister in Christ,
Bethany J.

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*Maggie is an entirely fictional character. You might say she was me just a few months ago.