Proposal: Part 7 of 8 - The night before the proposal

Posted May 01, 2008 by Herbie — Comments (0) — Filed under: Personal

Sorry for the delay in posting.  We (camp) had a network failure that I had to attend to.  I was at camp for 36 hours trying to solve it.  As the tech support that came to help us said, “We are up and walking not running.”  I might share some more later about it.

Wednesday April 26th was a rough day for me - trying to keep things a secret and the final plans moving.  Unfortunately, It seemed liked people were dropping like flies from the proposal plans. I remembered originally that there were only a handful of people not able to come.  Now things like Track Meets were being altered which included a bunch of staff kids and their parents, all legitimate reasons, and I totally understood.  I really thought my plans were in jeopardy.  Obviously, I wasn’t getting much computer work done at camp. I found myself either pacing, talking to people, or visiting with Lisa in the dinning hall - OFTEN.

For lunch that day Lisa invited me to eat with her.  She was a little concerned that the dining hall still wasn’t “set-up” for the group that was coming in.  All along I had told her that a group called “Via De Christo” was coming in and that they needed the dining hall set up a special way for Thursday night (another half truth).  I also told her that Carl Bishop was going to take care of the special set-up.

Now, Lisa will tell you that up to this point she was wondering if something was up.  She couldn’t put her finger on it but she “knew” something.  Women’s intuition I guess.  Reanna Baumgarten knew Lisa was expecting to go on a date with me on the 27th.  Evidently, Reanna asked her a couple times about it.  So that was one thing that brought some suspicion.  Also, I evidently wasn’t acting “normal” for several days (I’d really like to know what she thinks IS normal ).  I do know that I might have opened up my mouth a little to much when I asked her at lunch, “If there is something special she wanted to wear for the date.”  Well all that to say that Lisa and I had a conversation over the phone that night. Remember the whole “honesty” we talked about in Proposal 2 of 8.  Well it came back to haunt me in this phone call.

I asked Lisa, “So what are you expecting tomorrow on our date?”  She said, “Do you really want to know?”  Not truly hearing the “actual” question she was asking me I said, “ya, sure.”  She then said, “Ok… I think you are going to propose to me.”  At that moment my heart just sank.  After that moment, things are really fuzzy for me.  All I could think about is I failed.  I honestly thought about calling the whole thing off. You see in my mind I somehow got the idea that if you can’t surprise them in the proposal - it isn’t meant to be.  I know that is just ludicrous - but nonetheless it was what I thought.  Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night.