another one bites the dust!!!

I spent the evening with a friend from high school -- at least that is where we became friends. She is set to head back to Costa Rica in a week to finish out her year commitment to teaching English and tutoring the students. While she was there she met "someone" - with whom she then "fell in love with." He proposed December 14th. Due to the fact that he is from Nicargua, they must first navigate the channels of the INS and Homeland Security before he is granted permission to enter the country and they can therefore get marry. If all goes according to plan they will get married October 14th (just a month before mine ;)). My friend didn't set out to discover love, nor did she plan to get married -- in fact she was quite anti marriage, and didn't want it for some time in her life. It is always itneresting to see what love, and making that choice to love does to someone's mental life plan and perceptions of conventional ideology such as marriage. They will have a rough journey ahead with cultural differences, language barriers, INS paperwork, money, let alone the normal turmoil of getting married and being married. YET she has a peace about her, a sense of security, and confidance -- all that she hasn't had in the past.

Like with all my friends that have got engaged, there exists after engagement a sense of completeness, as if they have indeed been made one, they are now a whole. I think a large part of it is due to having that security of love and the promise of forever. We have it from God, our lover, our beloved; but when that forever love and commitment is manifested in human form and expressed in a proposal and the arrival of marriage something about the divine nature of that very love causes a new light to shine from within.

As it happens my circle of friends are slowly but surely experiencing that forever love, and when once we were all single, there aren't too many of us left - in fact for me - I have one friend although not married dating, and another friend who is also single (and well I guess a third sort of friend who is single that I kind of interact with); otherwise my friends that I socialize and interact with and share life with are married, some with children even.

As for me? Who knows...could 2008 following a February 29th proposal, it could be this November (some strange reason my mum thinks perhaps!!!), or it could not be for many years to come. But I will now readily admit that marriage is something that I do want for my life, that at some point in the future I wish to have the opportunity to make that choice to love, to be able to shine with that light from within. Until then I am a just a twenty something, Christian single living in the 21st century!!!!!