We did it

So we are back from the honeymoon. It will probably take a little time for me to blog about the weeks leading up to the wedding and the honeymoon, but I want to try to get everything down before it becomes fuzzy and I forget details about what happened and how. So, when we last left our heroine, she was freaking out about the fact that there was only two weeks left until the wedding. There were dresses to tailor and an apartment to clean and many other details to worry about. So many things happened leading up to the wedding that I am not sure exactly what I want to start with, but I guess I'll start with the phone.

About two months ago, I managed to drop my phone in water. More specifically, a toilet bowl filled with water. I was going to the bathroom at Ste. Marie's, phone in hand and in a rush, and failed to notice that they had replaced the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. The old toilet was pretty basic -- plain white, kind of boxy, and (most importantly) the lid to the tank was completely flat. The new toilet is still white, but it's more curvy in its lines and (most importantly) the lid to the tank slopes gracefully down toward the bowl. The lid also has a high gloss, nearly frictionless finish unmarred by years of use. Almost as if it's designed specifically to hurl things into the bowl. So when I slapped my phone down onto the tank to free up my hands to pull down my pants, that thing took off like it had been launched and didn't even flip or spin before it plopped smoothly into the dead center of the bowl.

I cursed loudly and snatched it out of the bowl, took it apart and dried it off as well as I could, but it wouldn't turn on. When I told Matt and some of the kids from youth group, they were full of helpful suggestions such as using a hairdryer on it or placing it inside a bowl filled with rice. We tried all of these things and the next day the phone worked fine, the only after-effects seeming to be that fractured pieces of rice seemed to have gotten stuck under the keypad and occasionally a key wouldn't work when it was pressed. But I would shake the phone, dislodge the rice, and it would work fine again.

Fast forward to about 2 1/2 weeks ago. Matt and I were at the mall and my phone's front and inside screens suddenly stopped working. It was simply showing a bunch of snow and broken lines on the outside, and the inside screen showed nothing at all. So we brought it to the Verizon store, and they replaced the phone with a new one. I have a backup assistant feature on my phone, so I was able to save all my contacts, and life went on. Then a week and a half before the wedding, the speaker phone on the new one inexplicably died. Since the ring for the phone comes through the speakers, this meant that I couldn't hear the phone ring anymore. So I went back to the Verizon store and they replaced it again. I should mention here that in that same week, my car suddenly started overheating, and I was without a car for several days while VIP got the right part in from New York. Fortunately my best friend from college, Sandra, came in to town on Saturday so she was able to give me a ride to work, but it was frustrating to no have a car to be able to run errands and get things done. Especially with the phone acting hinky.

Of course, we recognized that sometimes accidents happen and are simply accidents, but sometimes things happen as obstacles that are thrown in our path by evil spirits to distract us and discourage us. My friend Nicole commented that when you recognize this, you can just laugh it off, because there really is nothing that the devil can do to truly hurt us and in the grand scheme of things, it really is just problems with a cell phone. Therese put it another way: "Pffft... like something like that is going to stop you." And in a very perverse way, it was easy to see this all as a good thing -- if the devil was worried enough about our upcoming marriage to bother to make the weeks leading up to it so difficult, then that must mean that God has great plans for our marriage. It helps us to understand how the apostles could offer up praise and thanksgiving for their sufferings, and to appreciate how small our difficulties are.

But the straw that broke the camel's back for me was on Friday night, the day before the wedding. We were getting ready to leave Kim and Aaron's house after the rehearsal dinner, and I bent over to get a soda or two out of the cooler for myself and for Sandra's husband Mitch. My purse was over my shoulder, and when I bent over, the purse fell forward, the phone dropped out of the front pocket and plopped into the water and ice in the cooler. I cried out "Nonononononono!" and snatched the phone out of the water, but it had already been fully submerged. And I immediately began berating myself in my head, for being so careless to bend over with the purse on my should, for not putting the phone in the inside pocket, for just being so clumsy and awkward and stupid in so many many many ways... I couldn't laugh along with everyone else, because it was all my fault and I was so dumb and I began to cry and hate myself for crying even as I did.

Mitch grabbed the phone from me and began taking it apart, drying off the pieces with his shirt. Matt took my by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, "You know what this is," before pulling me into a hug and holding me while I regained my composure. They were like magic words, because they instantly dispelled every reprimanding, self-criticizing thought in my head. They snapped me back and reminded me that giving in to those thoughts was exactly what would make the devil happiest, and remembering that diffused the power that they had over me. Mitch handed the phone back to me and it worked perfectly right away. "All better," he said, and the phone's worked fine ever since.

More installments to come.