A formal proposal with a ring followed shortly after the NYC conversation. By the end of November 2005, we were officially engaged. I flew out to Jamaica to meet Conroy's family for the first time that Christmas and fell more in love with heritage of the man I was to marry. Looking through family photo albums that Christmas, I dreamt of the day I'd get to bring our children to their father's homeland and introduce them to their heritage as well. Conroy stayed behind in Jamaica for an additional week while I flew home to spend my last Christmas as a single adult in my parents' home.
That week was the longest amount of time we had spent apart since we had begun dating. Each day seemed excruciatingly long as I counted the moments until our reunion. The time spent together in Jamaica, focused almost exclusively on each other without the daily distractions of work and ministry, immediately followed by a week of separation confirmed to me that he was my other half. In my mind, by this time, I was as committed to Conroy as if we were already married. We actually even talked fleetingly of eloping while we were in Jamaica, but knew that our separate commitments as RDs would suffer if we came back married (not to mention how left out my family and our friends in the U.S. would feel!). So we reluctantly agreed we would wait the additional six months until June of 2006.
Waiting at the airport in JFK to pick up my fiance, I finally caught sight of his famous smile, then secondarily noticed how formally he was dressed. Upon questioning him about it later during the drive home, I was shocked to find out he'd almost been stuck in Jamaica due to a passport/immigration snafu. He had been in the U.S. embassy just hours before his flight was to take off trying to convince the official that he was indeed gainfully employed by a religious institution as his papers stated. The skeptical passport agent finally located Conroy's picture on the college website and granted him a renewed passport just in time for Conroy to jump in the car and catch his flight to the U.S. Such international red tape drama is par for the course, but my mind reeled to consider how our lives might have been drastically affected had the agent's whim resulted in Conroy's visa being cancelled. (Conroy has many such stories of God's direct intervention in getting through visa red tape, but that's for another blog...) Never a dull moment!
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