Wedding log stardate 7.28.2008 AKA: the proposal

So. I am getting married. To pretty much the most wonderful guy ever...yeah. I will be Rachel Norton by this time next year! And I am so freaking excited!!!!

For those of you who haven't heard, which isn't many, Chase proposed to me at church on June 22nd 2008.

He got up to go to the bathroom right before the end of the sermon, nothing suspicious. When the pastor finished up and after we prayed he said "Okay. We have one more announcement and I think you'll all like it." Then Chase walked out onto the stage from behind a door with a bouquet of red roses and pink lilies.

(Now I had decided Chase was my one a while ago but every time I asked him about getting married he explained that he just didn't know what would happen in the future and wouldn't be proposing for a while, if at all. By this time I had accepted the fact that I was just going to have to wait and see what the future would hold for us. And from what Chase said it seemed like it would be another decade!)

So. my first thought was that he was doing something special for his mom because she had been sick for a while. (although he did look especially nervous!) And I just sat there staring because a little voice inside my heart said "HE'S PROPOSING!" but another little voice inside my brain said "NO HE'S NOT! YOU HAVE ANOTHER DECADE!" so I just sat there staring, secretly hoping he was proposing, until he said "Rachel, would you come up here?" And I shakily stood up, and when I say 'shakily' I mean sh-a-kil-y, I shaked up on the stage, only vaguely aware of the entire congregation watching, the whole time the voice in my brain shouting that he WAS NOT proposing so that I didn't get my hopes up and have them dashed against the rocks if he didn't. When I got on the stage I stopped with my butt facing the audience so Chase gentley moved me over by the microphone. Then he said something about me being his best friend for the past year and a half and how he's had a lot of friends come and go but he wasn't going to let me go because he was lucky to have me in his life at all and wanted to keep me in it forever. (That wasn't it exactly but, sadly, it was all kind of a blur. An exciting, totally awesome, lovely blur.) Then, he got down on one knee and pulled out the ring!

That is when I started bawling and said yes.

We got up and hugged and were engaged happily ever after.