Post by Tismri on Jan 12, 2017 0:27:02 GMT -5
My older brother has always been my hero. I followed after him when I was young and adored everything he did. He has always been so good to me; much more than I ever deserved. He is the one person who has never been critical of anything I tried to pursue, and has always been the most patient and willing to listen.
He joined the Navy right after college, and went through a long, hard time. I missed him greatly, and it had always pained me to know just how hard that time was for him. I was lonely without him, but I still had plenty of friends, as well as my parents and sister. He had no one like that. Though there were his fellow trainees in Officer Candidate School, and in the bases he was stationed at afterward, he had no one he could truly confide in, trust, and talk to. God was leading him down a path where there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel.
Once he finished OCS and nuclear power school, he was assigned to King's Bay, Georgia, to be shipped out on a ballistic missile submarine about twice a year. (Four months on land, three months out.) Again, it seemed like a long, lonely road.
Then something happened; a fellow officer told him that he and his wife were going to attend a semi-formal, and they wanted Jarrod to take one of her sorority sisters. Jarrod agreed. Brianna had been planning to attend with a group of other sorority members, but also agreed to the blind date. She assumed he was going to be some frat boy whom she would meet at the event and would never see again afterward. She was in for quite a surprise. He called her up and arranged to meet her for coffee the day before the event. He showed up with a bouquet of purple flowers. They talked for hours. She learned that he was a Navy officer, he was intelligent, caring, and gentlemanly. Still, her expectations were a bit low; she didn't really think he would be around after the event.
Well, he stuck around. He would call her when he said he would, sent her flowers often, and in general was the perfect boyfriend. A month before his next deployment, he asked her to officially be his girlfriend, and she agreed. That began two years of a wondrous romance punctuated by months of devastating separation during his underways.
I will never forget the complete transformation Jarrod went through. For so long, he had been depressed, even despairing. He had been hating his life and struggling not to be angry with where God had brought him. But after only knowing Brianna for a few months, he was noticeably happier, always cheerful. He would get this big, goofy grin whenever he thought about her, and when they were together, you could see they were taking joy in just being in each other's company.
In the summer of 2015, while he was visiting us at home, he plotted out his proposal. He contacted her three older brothers and her father, and he asked for them to each write her a letter. With these notes in hand, he went to three places (lunch, mani-pedis, and a salon) and told them to give Brianna and her best friend Corey, who was in on all this, whatever they wanted at his expense. They also were to each give her one of her brother's letters for her to read. Once this fun was finished, she went back home where her dad gave her his letter, and her family told her to get ready, put on something nice. They drove her out to a nearby pier, where she found Jarrod's truck parked with the passenger door open. The stereo was playing John Legend's All of Me, ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=450p7goxZqg ) and on the seat, with a purple flower just like the ones he gave her on their first date, was a letter from him. The end of the letter instructed her, "come out to the beach, Sweetheart. I have something to ask you." There, he was wearing his Summer White uniform, the pier was covered in rose petals leading to him. He took a moment to tell her how much she meant to him and asked her to marry him. She said yes immediately.
The entire day of the wedding, Jarrod and Brianna never stopped smiling. It was to the point where it hurt, but they didn't care. But the entire thing means so much to me because I had not seen my brother smile like that in a very, very long time. God brought them together at just the right place and time, and prepared them for each other. They have taught each other so much, and God has used this wonderful woman to literally transform his life. I am so grateful to witness it.
Fairy tales do exist. These two are proof of it.
