Her!

I was sitting at a friend's dinner table when I first saw her. Sarah walked through the door and I could tell right away that... she was wearing sock monkey footy pajamas. Our story starts well before actually meeting, but that was when I first saw her. Our story starts with my blog post "Her?" six months before. My friend Kaci suggested that I go on a date with her friend Sarah. Due to what we now agree as fortunate delays we didn't go on that first date until last October. But that first moment when my eyes saw her clad in her footy pajamas, I did know that she had a great sense of humor. However, I had no idea that eleven months later I, on bended knee in the exact spot that I first saw her, would be asking her to be my wife.

Rewind to last October, the fourteenth to be precise. I sucked up the courage to stop by her house and ask her out on our first date. We started with hesitance, both wondering whether this was a relationship that we should pursue. By December, we were falling hard. In the spring we struggled to understand how to relate to each other in our spiritual lives. I'm not sure when, though she keeps asking me for the exact moment, but by early summer I was sure that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

I really like our story, mostly because it isn't perfect. We had to work through a lot of stuff, and we continue to work through our own messy lives as we seek to intertwine them. We came with our own baggage, with our own misunderstandings of how relationships worked, and without knowing, really, how to love someone in terms of dying to ourselves. We both came into the relationship with the expectation that it would require work, and we have the friends and family surrounding us to lend us wisdom, guidance, and sometimes a little smack upside the head. We have a great Church body to lead us. And we have a good god, who is with us in the struggles and the joys that we go through. As I have often said to Sarah in midst of a tough conversation: it won't be easy, but it will be good. Sarah, you have my love.