Category — Love

This evening I was sitting on the living room floor facebook-chatting with my 18 year old daughter while my hubby read a chapter of Narnia to the kids. Partway through the story, my three year old felt the siren call of sleep and came to snuggle against me.

I love that she still thinks I am the best person to snuggle with when going to sleep– yes, even though that means she still climbs in bed with us most mornings, and spends the last hour or two of the night vigorously kneading my ribs with her little toes.

This evening she soon dozed off, then slumped off my lap, and wiggled down to the floor to continue her slumber. After the story and prayers, as I hugged various children and reminded them to put on a clean shirt or get a shower or take your medicine or brush your teeth or tell me you love me for-goodness-sakes, I became conscious of my husband moving in next to me.

In one sure easy move, he scooped up our limp three year old, draped her over his shoulder and strode off to brush her teeth and tuck her into bed.

As I watched him walk away, broad shouldered and narrow-hipped in his black t-shirt and Levis, I saw him with new eyes. And marveled over the gorgeousness of him. And exulted that he is MINE.

The fact that he carries little girls off and brushes their pearly teeth and tucks them tenderly into bed with the experience and adept skill of a father only adds to the charm of him in my eyes.

And then he comes back a few minutes later, unaware of his charm, and wonders why I am staring at him so intently all of a sudden. And he grins anyway, pleased. And when I come to snuggle in beside him on the couch he kisses me soundly, right in front of the teenagers.

Wonderful man.

Lucky am I.

Part 1 | Part 2 |Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

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August 23, 1986.

I spent the morning with my family and my best friend Nicole. I was thrilled she’d been able to fly from Florida to be in my wedding. We ate breakfast, gathered things together to bring to the church, and fussed endlessly with our hair, an operation that involved curling irons and copious amounts of hairspray.

I imagined John spending lots of time getting ready too, but found out later that he’d actually spent the entire morning washing his car to gleaming perfection. His car, it seems, was much higher maintenance than he.

My bridesmaids and I waited to dress til we got to church. We were giddy with excitement. Looking back I can’t believe how young we all were. Every person in that 12-person wedding party was 20 or younger. And it truly was a party. It was a glorious day.

In the really momentous times of my life, I always find myself fighting unbelief, wondering if this thing could really be happening to me.

I remember wondering that when my mother and I looked at each other in the mirror after we finally got my headpiece on straight.

I remember thinking that when I stood at the back of the church, holding onto my dad’s arm, waiting for the music that was our cue to begin the walk into the church.

I remember thinking that as I listened to the bridal rustle, the movement made by a roomful of people turning in unison to watch the bride– me?!?- walk up that aisle.

But when my eyes met John’s as he watched me coming up that aisle, there was no unbelief, no wondering. Because I knew that look in his eyes. His look of love was fairy-tale wonderful, but it was real. It was what had carried me to my wedding day –and through it –and up that aisle and into his arms. And by God’s grace it carries me through my days even now, 22 years later.

Up at the front of the church, we were all nerves and excitement. The church was hot. The service was long. Sweat ran down my spine. Partway through the message John and I got restless and started playing thumbsies with our joined hands. I wonder now what our poor pastor thought– probably that we were a couple of crazy 19 year olds.

But when it was time for the vows, we were serious. My voice broke as I promised John my life, and his eyes were intent and solemn as he promised his right back.

A kiss and a jubilant walk back down the aisle, and it was done. We shook a hundred hands and smiled a thousand smiles, and at some point a couple hours later sat down and shared a slice of cake before racing off on the grand adventure that was our lives.

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From high school sweethearts to happily ever after.

By God’s grace.

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You can read John’s story at Duct Tape and Baling Twine. If you are sharing your story, leave a direct link in comments, below. And thanks to everyone who has shared their story this month. I have so much enjoyed reading each one.

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Part 1 | Part 2 |Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

The problem with waiting 22-1/2 years to tell a story is that….ummm…some of the details get a little fuzzy.  So here is what I know for a fact.   We definitely got engaged in February.  I had a ring at some point after then, but before the wedding.   I know that we went ring shopping right after we got engaged, but the sticker shock was a little much for us, so being broke college students, we opted to wait a bit for the ring.   I don’t remember exactly how long….

But I do remember getting the ring. I was working at both a nursing home and at McDonald’s at the time, and John was also working two jobs. (I think this must have been after our first year of school was done, because I don’t know how we would have managed two jobs each PLUS school.)

Between our four combined jobs, it was challenging to find time together.  The day that he proposed, I had half an hour between my shift at McDonald’s and the nursing home.   John met me at the nursing home in the employee parking lot, and I hopped into his car to chat for a few minutes before I had to go inside and start my shift.

He told me to open the glove compartment.  Inside was a sweet note as well as a small box, which I knew right away contained my ring.  He asked me (again!) and I said yes (again!), and we kissed.  I was over the moon, admiring my lovely ring.  But all too soon it was time to go inside and get to work.  It wasn’t till I got out of the car that I realized that the love of my life had proposed to me next to…..a dumpster.

I tease him greatly about that now, but you know what?  It didn’t really matter to me then, and it doesn’t really matter to me now.  The important thing was that he has my heart and I have his.  A romantic locale for a proposal is sweet (and would make great blog fodder) but it is not at all essential to a happy marriage.

Once I had my ring, it seemed even sillier to wait longer. Back in February our original inclination had been to get married in August. Thanks to his parents’ concern, our plan had been sidelined for awhile. But by June, that original plan started making more and more sense. We’d been dating long enough now to know that we weren’t going to be changing our minds about each other. We’d been engaged since February. We barely saw each other between our four jobs. At least if we were married, we’d see each other at the beginning and end of the day. Why not do it?

In early July, we abruptly decided that now was the time. Six weeks from now, to be exact. August 23rd. Bride magazine listed planning timelines anywhere from 3 months to 12 months. I cared not one whit. How hard could it be to pull together a wedding?

Looking back, my wonderful mother in law, who likes everything done decently and in order, must have been in a panic. But within a couple weeks we’d ordered cake, invitations and fabric for bridesmaid dresses, and had all sorts of other details well on the way to completion. A neighbor was helping us make lovely bouquets with silk flowers mounted on fans.

We found a professional photographer that friends of ours had used. His twist was unusual, but amazingly affordable. He took the pictures, and handed the bride and groom the undeveloped rolls of film. His fee? $100. A few weeks later friends of our would get married and pay several thousand dollars for pictures alone.

I chose to wear my mother’s wedding dress– it fit beautifully and had a sleek classic design. My mother in law gave me the headpiece that she had worn at her own wedding, and I bought yards of tulle at the fabric store for a veil.

Ready or not, we were getting married….

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My darlin’ man will have his version of this story up on his blog very soon, so go check it out. (Say hi to him too, because he’s wonderful and adorable, even if he did propose behind a dumpster.) And if you have more of your own love story, leave a comment below sharing the exact link to your blog post, OK?

Part One | Part Two |Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six

By Christmas of our first year of college, John had moved back home and I had moved out of the dorms and found an apartment with a friend.  We were both working, both going to school, and we now lived 45 minutes apart. By February the crazy schedule was really getting old.  We’d been together more than a year now, and basically we wanted to spend all our free time together.

My roomie was getting used to John hanging out with us til rather late most evenings.  But no matter how late he hung out to chat, it was always painful to say goodbye.  Finally on Valentine’s Day John asked me to marry him.  We weren’t entirely sure about the date.  (Maybe August?) But it felt right to be planning a future than would put an end to the goodbyes at the end of every day.

A few days later we went to tell our folks.   Mine were delighted.  Their congratulations couldn’t have  been more sincere, despite the fact that we were only 18 and 19 years old.

But John’s folks….

They welcomed us in with smiles, but when they heard our news, there came a gravity across their faces that drained the ebullience right out of me.

I remember sitting at their kitchen table, seeing the concern on their faces. Their words were kind and careful.  They reassured us that they liked me, and I believed them.  But they just didn’t see how we would be able to get through school if we got married so soon.

We told them we were thinking of August.  They thought we were making it unnecessarily hard on ourselves by rushing into this.   Why not wait until the following June?   Or if we were really anxious to get married, even Christmas?

Ten months til Christmas felt like an eternity.  But we agreed to think about it.

Our Love Story: Graduation and College

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The stress over school came to a head one grey fall day.   I remember standing at the edge of the river near our dorm, watching leaves float down the river and wondering if it was really going to work between us.  John and I were arguing again. He was convinced that the source of tension between us was the friend.  I was sure all I needed was a little more consideration and kindness.

Finally, frustrated, John told me I had to choose between him and the friend.  I knew he wasn’t at all sure who I’d choose.  But he was done worrying about this thing and he wanted it over, one way or the other.

What he didn’t realize was that it was no contest in my mind.   I wanted him.  And I told him so.

My quick and definite choice must have spoken to him in a way that my weeks of hinting and fussing and complaining about his moods had not done.  He felt reassured enough to finally hear what I’d been concerned about all along, and he gave me the first real smile I’d seen in weeks.

And in being asked to choose again, I remembered what had drawn me to him in the first place.

And we made up right there on that riverbank with the leaves falling down around us.

To this day I cannot drive past that spot without remembering that grey fall afternoon when he asked me to choose.

And I won’t ever regret my choice.

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You can read John’s side of our story over at Duct Tape and Baling Twine.  And if you have more of your own story to share, just leave a link in comments, below!

It wasn’t until February that we finally danced together, to songs by Journey and Loverboy and Chicago. It felt natural to be together by then.

We weren’t surprised at all that when prom rolled around we were still together. We had an easy familiarity with each other, and in our heads we felt like a couple.

Thinking about upcoming college expenses, I sensibly borrowed a dress from a friend for the valentine’s dance, and wore last year’s dress for Prom. My prom dress was new to John, and that’s all I remember caring about.

Our relationship felt like an island. People swirled around us, breaking up and getting back together and repeating. There we were on our island, sitting together every lunch, cheering at pep assemblies together, spending every non-school moment together that we possibly could. We had what we’d both been wanting for years. There was a welcome certainty about our relationship, a sense of permanence.

My folks were quietly pleased with our relationship. My dad liked the way John looked him in the eye and shook his hand and treated me with respect. My mom told me later that she had a sense of peace about John from the start. She could see he was the real deal, a person to depend on, and after the ups and downs of my past relationships, she was happy for me, plain and simple.

John’s parents liked me too, but they were concerned about the seriousness of our relationship. They thought it would be better if we waited to get serious until we both had some college under our belts. John’s dad had a long talk with him, trying to coax him to go to college at his alma mater, the University of Idaho, most of a day’s drive away from the college I’d chosen. I was devastated, unable to imagine college life with John living many hours away. What would I do if could only see him every few weeks? And doubt nagged away as well. What if he met some other girl?

I didn’t feel like I could change my plans, as my college had the nursing program that I needed for my plans, and the other college didn’t. But John had a huge respect for his father, and felt his pressuring intensely. He wanted to do what was right, and he wanted his dad to be happy with him. John spent several days seriously considering his dad’s request, badgered also on my side by my tears and incredulous disbelief that he would even consider going to school away from me.

In the end he went with his heart. Life just wouldn’t feel worthwhile if we had to live apart. To his dad’s dismay he applied at the local college along with me. It remained to be seen if we could juggle school, work, and our relationship. We were sure we could do it all. John’s folks hoped we were right.

That fall we lived in the same dorm, John on the guys’ side and me over on the girls’ floor. It must have been hard for our parents and siblings when we moved out. But we were so intensely focused on ourselves and what we wanted to accomplish that we barely thought about the family we left behind. Half an hour from home, we went home for weekends only occasionally.

John was soon feeling weighted down by the various assignments from various classes. He knew his dad was watching to see if he could do this, and he wanted intensely to do well. He started slipping away from me, always studying. I found my classes to be fairly easy,and was less of a perfectionist than John. I’d roar through my work and be ready to play, then get frustrated to realize that John was still methodically plowing through his assignments.

Even when we were together John was grumpy and distracted, always feeling like he should be studying. In the first 8 months of our relationship, I’d been the center of his universe. But college had horned in and within weeks I was feeling neglected and unappreciated.

Distressed by the change I was seeing in John, and failing whenever I attempted to tell him how I was feeling, I started confiding in a guy friend.  Big mistake there.  He tried to play relationship counselor, and he honestly cared about both of us. Problem was, he was interested in me as well. His understanding friendship and open appreciation for me was balm to my wounded heart. But it was a recipe for relationship disaster for John and me.

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John’s Story is already up. Do you have another installment of your own love story? Leave a link in comments, below.

I’ve been so much enjoying reading all the love stories this month. Not everyone’s path has been smooth, or easy, or picture-perfect. And yet in came love, redeeming past mistakes and past unhappiness, and pulling us forward into a place of hope.

I think hope is part of what makes us love a good love story. We all want someone to be passionate about, and someone who is crazy about us. Hearing that it has happened for others gives us permission to hope for ourselves.

Even in the best of love stories, however, reality intrudes. Two imperfect humans can’t get along perfectly all the time. Sometimes ‘the’ person in your life seems to be taking a ridiculously long time to arrive, leaving you with a whole lot of longing in your heart. Other times the person you love doesn’t stick around. As I have read the various stories, I’ve been thinking of those of you for whom these love stories might be painful. We all walk around with wounds of one kind or another in our hearts, after all.

I try hard not to preach on this blog. But I can’t write about a month of love without writing about the best love story there is. The story of God’s love for us.

God’s love for me. The person who snaps at her kids and growls at her husband, and has too much love for chocolate and too little interest in exercise, and who has made choices in her life that just. plain. stink.

For you. Wherever you are and whoever you are and whatever you have done.

He knows our story. He loves us just as we are. And he longs for us to know and love Him too.

Yes, God the Maker of the universe wants each of us to know him.

He gave us human love, I think, as just a tiny glimpse of the glory that is going to be revealed to us in Heaven. The perfect love that won’t be marred by fights and imperfection and striving and busyness and selfishness.

The love we all long for.

The love we stumble around here on this earth striving for all of our days.

The love we taste in brief moments in a lover’s kiss, or a baby’s smile, or a mother’s praise or a friend’s embrace.

The love we won’t experience in full until we get to heaven.

Do you know that love?

Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us

Deuteronomy 7:9 Know therefore that the LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

One of the things that my previous not-so-great boyfriend left me with was an extreme passion for skiing. His dad had been a ski instructor, and we’d logged a lot of time on the slopes the previous year. I loved skiing so much that during the fall of my senior year in high school, I bought a season pass to our local ski area. Before John and I met, I’d already hit the slopes half a dozen times. And very soon after we began talking, I was delighted to discover that he was a skier as well.

And so over Christmas break and on into January and February, we skied. And skied. And skied.

John would pick me up very early in the morning — it seems like sometimes it was still dark. (Or that may have been the Mondays when we went night skiing.) We’d load my skis into the little green car along with his, and take off. He’d bring a thermos of crazy-strong, crazy-sweet hot chocolate to drink when we started to get cold, and we’d both pack a lunch. At the bottom of the mountain, John would park the car and we’d take the ski bus up the winding road to the top. Our area suffers from air inversions in the winter, with hazy air gathering in the valleys. But on the mountain the sun always shone.

John may have fallen in love with me as he watched me during math class. But I fell in love on those ski lifts. After the initial lift-line scurry to get ourselves situated and plumph down onto the seats at the proper moment, we’d settle ourselves back into the seat, and lift off into the sky. It was our own little world. I remember the smell of his Aqua Velva and the smooth profile of his cheek and the red leather of his gloves, and the way he’d look over at me and grin, like I was better to look at than the mountains.

I am reasonably certain that our first hand-holding involved me (ever the schemer) complaining about frozen fingers, and may even have resulted in one of my gloves falling off the chair lift to the ground far below. (Note to self: never remove gloves on a ski lift, even if an exceptionally cute young man is offering to warm your fingers.)

All too soon, the nearing-the-top anticipation would tear our attention away and require us to grip our poles and lift up our ski tips and shimmy forward on the seat and (hopefully) glide gracefully away from the chairlift. (Though I do remember one time that John got a little distracted– how could that have been?– and thrashed his way off the lift while I hastily skied out of the range of his flailing limbs.)

But that bubble of time sitting next to each other in between ski runs was pure magic. We talked and talked, and looked and laughed, and I fell in love. And always there was another run and another ride and another day to ski.

I went skiing 27 days that winter, and John skiied 18. Our first kiss was in the back seat of a half-empty ski bus on the way down the mountain at the end of a day of skiing. John was ever the proper sort; once back at school he would barely peck me on the cheek in the hall between classes, even when we’d been dating for months. But the ski bus…well, that was different.

In between ski trips we talked on the phone and went out for ice cream and and did homework together in his parents’ basement, and talked on the phone some more. I vividly remember the first time we talked, hesitantly at first, and then more certainly, about a future together. It was February, and I was sitting in the corner of the dining room, as close to privacy as I could get while tethered to the telephone by its spiral leash.

We’d been dating for two months.

I was 17.

He was 18.

And we were already dreaming a future together.

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John’s got his side of the story– with pictures!– over at Duct Tape and Baling Twine. If you are sharing your story, please leave an exact link in comments, below.

Part One: First Sight
Part Two: The guy in math class
Part Three: First Date
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A day or two after our first date, John called. He said his mom had asked him to run some Christmas presents to his extended family who lived around town. He asked me if I wanted to go Santa Clausing with him. So all in one evening I met his parents, his siblings, his aunt and uncle, and 3 grandparents. All I can figure is that the guy must have had a good feeling about me.

My good feelings about him were growing as well. We were looking forward to spending more time together. But we had a problem. You might remember that just days before our first date, I’d asked another guy to the Sadie Hawkins Christmas dance. And at about the same time, John had been asked by another girl. That meant we were both going to the dance. Just not together.

I think we both considered backing out on our dates. Given the way the dance went, I think our dates might actually have preferred that. But neither of us had the heart to do it.

The night of the dance I dutifully showed up at the dance with my date– and then spent the whole dance trying to catch sight of John, very handsome in his suit, dancing with another girl across the room. We both have vivid memories of looking over our date’s shoulders and smiling across the dance floor at each other. It was oddly romantic.

For us.

I cringe to think of how it must have felt to be our dates that evening. They must have wondered why we only heard half their words, and were so often caught staring off across the room. That evening was long, but somehow we got through it. Our dates were probably just as glad as we were when the evening was done.

Maybe more.

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If you’re sharing your own story, leave an exact link in comments, below. And keep an eye out for John’s side of the story at Duct Tape and Baling Twine. Rumor has it that he will be posting it soon.

My hubby added another installment to his version of how we met.