marriage

Does This Make Me Look Engaged?

/ Rebecca J. Whitman / 2 Comments
Engaged on Christmas Day 2023

The first time he asked me to be his girl, I threw up a hand in disgust and said “As if?!” That was 20+ years ago…

Clint and I didn’t quite grow up together, but we went to the same church as teenagers. I remember wanting a boyfriend but feeling largely unseen by all the boys I was interested in. My best friend and I would bemoan this issue screaming out in the safety and privacy of my car on youth nights.

On one of those nights, Clint approached me in the parking lot and asked me to date him. It went a little something like this:

Clint: I’m sure you know I’m interested in you. I just haven’t made my mind up yet if I want to ask you…or your sister.

Me: Whatever?! Good luck with that! (walks away laughing in disgust)

Because of that one bad approach and my response to it, Clint never tried again. I lumped him in with all the other things wrong with narrow-minded teen boys and never saw the courage it took for him to try in the first place. In reality, Clint was always seeing more quality in me than I saw in him.

Fast forward 10+ years and I had moved away, but he stayed right in Goldsboro and in the same church. Sometimes he thought about me and wondered where I was. Sometimes I thought of him and wondered the same. To him, I was the girl that got away. To me, he was the boy that never changed.

But life did change him. It changed us both.  He got married and had kids. I had multiple failed relationships. He stayed faithful to his church and his family. I traveled the world trying to find my own happy ending.

Marriage and becoming a father mellowed Clint out. He couldn’t be focused on himself or all his solo interests. When his marriage ended, he was heartbroken. He never wanted to be alone and never planned for his relationship to fail; he was all in. She wasn’t. It was a dark time in his life, and it took a long time for him to believe in love again.

Though I was never married, I came close a couple of times. Something was always missing. I knew I had to agree with my future husband on the important foundational issues like faith and finances, but I wasn’t. So I remained frustrated in all my relationships and frustrated single when I was out of them.

In all of this, I cried out to God for my person. “Where is he, God? I can’t do this (life) without him much longer!” Throughout my life, as I thought of the unknown man I would marry, I prayed for God’s protection over him and that God would guard his heart and body and keep it for me. I wrote about him too in poems that are just coming true now. Though I shook my fist at God for His timing, I ultimately trusted Him to take care of my man and be able to speak to him on my behalf.

2023 came and I was crying myself to work every day just so filled with loneliness. I was happy in my own skin but unhappy in relationships. I had tried everything and failed; I didn’t know how to move forward. My constant prayer during that season was “how much longer? How much longer, Lord?!”

On April Fool’s Day, I got a message on Facebook. It was from Clint. He said he wanted to reach out and reconnect as friends. Burned by men and trusting nothing online anymore, I said yes. At least this was a real person I knew, I thought, not all the fake catfishers I’d been recently burned by. “A friendship is harmless,” I told myself.

We talked non-stop for the next several days. I felt my heart thaw and begin to hope again. Maybe…maybe this could be love? Clint felt it too. Although he asked for friendship, he felt God urging him to ask for more. So he pursued me, asked me to be his girlfriend, and on April 5th, we started a relationship.

Right from the start, things were different. Clint treated me like an equal partner in everything. I felt peace just being with him. He felt peace in my presence too. We were attracted to each other and patient with our passion. We respected each other and truly wanted to make each other happy. While we were two very different people, we found a safety and partnership in each other that made our individual lives better. I found comfort in his 30+ year commitment to our childhood church. I found a safe place to share my full Pentecostal faith; a man who not only understood but shared my beliefs. It was the missing piece I had longed for in all my past relationships. My heart finally found its home–in the man I had written off in my childhood.

December 10th, a darkness happened. We lost my father. I mourned all that dad wouldn’t be able to see in my life. On Christmas, Clint and his daughter, Anna, came. Anna decorated the tree with our family’s sentimental ornaments and ribbons from dad’s memorial flowers. Christmas Day, we opened presents and Anna painted my nails. She made me look good for a picture of Clint and I by the tree, but it was all a set up. Instead of a picture, she was filming. Clint knelt to one knee in front of the tree and in front of my mom and Anna, and he asked me to marry him. I was in shock but didn’t have to think about it. I knew my answer was yes.

Later, I found out that Clint had asked my dad’s permission to marry me in July. Dad talked to him and told him “welcome to the family”. Anna and my bestie, Andrea, had helped him pick out the ring. Suddenly my sadness over dad’s passing was overcome by joy. God found a way to include my father in our marriage by guiding Clint to talk to him earlier about it.

Celebrating our engagement

Looking back on all this now after a year of dating and engagement, I think God’s timing was perfect. He could have put us together when we were younger when our differences would have driven us apart. He could have put us together partway down the road when our brokenness needed each other but our hearts weren’t open. Instead, God brought us together after failed relationships taught us to be flexible and open to love.

If God had done it any earlier, a lot would be different. As it is, we get to start off life as a family, and I get a daughter who loves to read as much as I do.

Neither Clint nor I are perfect people. We view our relationship as a lifetime commitment, and we stay committed to working through our difficult times as partners. That is what marriage is: it is a living reminder of the partnership God offers us through His Son, Jesus Christ. It’s a continual lifestyle of compromise, integrity, and trust.

I will share more about our journey and the wedding that has been years in the making here on this blog. Subscribe to catch all the news as it comes out!

Two Are Better Than One: How Partnerships Make The Dream Work

/ Rebecca J. Whitman

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. 

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

As a small business, I hear a lot about partnerships between organizations. This business partners with that one to facilitate this service and now both entites had a point of impact in the community. In fact, greater impact is accomplished because of their partnership than could have been even imagined if they stuck to doing it all alone.

The principles of partnership are as ancient as the Garden of Eden. When God created Adam and looked down on him, he didn’t say, “good job, son, you are killin’ it on your own!” No, on the contrary, he said it is not good for man to be alone, let me make him a helper. Why? Because God designed us to live and work as teams–not individuals.

Business

If you look at the needs of your organization–your specific business plan–you should see a target demographic that you want to reach. To truly accomplish that goal, you can’t do it by yourself, you need to bring in other people who can agree with your vision and have the passion for it that you do.

No organization grows from idea to thriving business with just one person. If you want to be successful, you have to have vision for the future and a plan to mentor others into your seat on the company because eventually you will retire or pass away and you don’t want to build something that just ceases to exist in 10-20 years.

Entrepreneur

It might sound silly to list this separate than business, but the truth is that they are not the same. Though every small business needs to have vision and growth, many are franchisees of bigger businesses. An entrepreneur is someone who is a one-off business: they came up with an idea and pursued it based on their own creativity, vision, and willpower.

Entrepreneurs are the invisible demographic in a community. They are the people like Amy Brogden who look at a town, see a vacancy, and believe they can do something to meet that need. God bless them! We need more people like that everywhere. Small towns are dying without them.

Entrepreneurs work hard to make their vision prosper. They live with the daily reality that the economy can change in a minute and they can be out of a job, so they are always on pivot to stay relevant. The bigger they grow, the more people they carry under them, and the more burden they feel to be successful; no one wants to work as hard as we do to build a business that dies in a couple years.

Relationships

Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord.

Proverbs 18:22 KJV

From the beginning, God set us up to work together in partnership. He took a rib out of Adam to make Eve because he wanted her to be something standing beside him and working with him not ruling over him or trampled by him.

Women of God, you have such an amazing Creator! He saw your worth and recognized you long before Susan B. Anthony or any of those other folks even existed. Get to know Him and praise Him because our Lord Jesus really is a good God to serve.

–Rebecca J. Whitman

It is tempting to live life single–especially if you have faced any heartache in relationships–but I really don’t think that was God’s design for the majority of us. There are far more verses in the Bible about love and marriage and filling the Earth with children than there are about the blessings of singleness. We all must be single for a season, but we are also responsible for being able to see when that season has ended.

Mixing Love and Business

If you are an entrepreneur, it can be really hard to be in a relationship. Sometimes the demands of work make it hard to have room to share your life with anyone else. It is easier to say a relationship will hinder your productivity than it is to say it will help it.

Still, I have seen too many married couples thriving in business to say that single mindedness is really the truth we should hold to—and I am not the only one. According to this article from Entrepreneur.com, research shows that growth in business is tied to a strong and thriving marriage.

Truth Hits Home

When my maternal grandparents came home from their honeymoon, they came home to a box full of baby chicks, and my grandma cried. We were never told why she cried, but I have always believed it was because she knew how much work was ahead of them and the weight of it was frightening. Entrepreneurship is an often scary adventure.

From then on, the adventure was non-stop for them. From chicken farming to dairy farming to firewood to restaurants and everything in between, my grandparents were successful entrepreneurs in Colorado. They were married over 50 years and now rest buried together.

I never saw that entrepreneural life buy them a fancy house or lots of things, but we lacked for nothing at grandma’s house. Their faith and love poured into everyone they knew: friends, family, and strangers. It was a level of kindness and generosity so great, in fact, that it took multiple funerals to celebrate them when they died—and we still talk about them years later today. That kind of legacy doesn’t happen when you live life alone.

This godly heritage reminds me every day that true love and business success are possible. The wedding rings that honored that marriage wait to honor my own now. I like to think my grandparents would be tickled pink to know I will wear grandma’s rings someday. I like to think they would be proud to see me in business now much like them—living day to day on my faith in Jesus.

There is nothing easy about being in business for yourself. Some days you want to curl up and cry or just go back to working for someone else so you can sleep at night.

But all those fears are just growing pains. In time, the business you are building will establish itself if you don’t give up and if you make strategic partnerships that will propel you forward.

Don’t be afraid to risk failure for love. When you find someone worth giving your heart to, be bold enough to speak your truth even if that means writing it down in a letter. Pray for them. Invest in them. Make them a priority and trust me in this: the ROI will be worth the effort.

Green Acorn: A Prayer

/ Rebecca J. Whitman

We certainly associate Spring with growth, but Autumn is the start. We have to shed our leaves and let things die for them to grow anew.

Millie, editor of Sylvia magazine
Reading by author, Rebecca Whitman

What will you start in me today, Lord?

What gentle bud will cocoon its life and wait for Spring? What leaves will shed and rot to feed the root of this dream? What branches will You prune from me because they bare no fruit? Will it be a wandering branch of thought or a whole arm out of touch with the mission?

I wait and listen…but I’m a little scared too.

It’s been a fear unsettled since I returned here, yet I want You to unearth it. Uproot it like the weed it is and water me with the Miracle-Gro of Your presence. I feel like I can’t hide away enough in You. Isn’t that part of the evidence here of transformation?

I give you…everything.

I surrender everything I have because I know it is a gift from You–a resource given to use not hoard. I know you will take care of me and get resources to me if you know you can get them through me.

I work through my waiting.

I pursue greater trust in You. I write down my dreams, and I’m not afraid to dream big with You! I make plain the steps to fulfill what I can, but, ultimately, it all falls apart without Your hand.

I have looked up at the sky through a world full of acorns.

I have seen the light through the leaves and let them fall on me. I have let brown acorns root and take residence where they should not have been, while the good green ones fell away from me. Why was my soil not good enough for their seed? Why did some other woman grab them with her earth, become their lover–their mother of children?

My ground, though aged and weak, has rested. The once stripped soil is fertile ground once more. I wait–with thanksgiving and expectation–for tomorrow’s planting and harvest. I thank You, Lord, for the green acorn You have chosen and are preparing for me today.