My Teenage Crush
This past weekend, Nathan and I celebrated our first anniversary in the mountains of Hayesville, N.C. It was so restful, fun and peaceful. We are reluctantly returning to our usual routine.
Thinking back to last year, when Nathan and I first became engaged, many of our friends asked how we’d met. Many assumed that, in this technology age, we’d met online. While each of us dabbled with online dating, that wasn’t how we came to date each other. In fact, our love story is a unique story spanning decades.
I can’t conclusively say when I first met Nathan because he is the cousin of two of my best girlfriends from high school. Once I could drive, I was at his cousins’ house nearly every weekend. Nathan’s family lived about 30 minutes away from me and his cousins, but they would often come over for lunch on Saturday afternoons. We’d spend the afternoons together talking, laughing, and napping. Truth be told, Nathan and I spent some of those afternoons flirting.
Of course, I thought he was very cute, and with all the teenage flirting, it didn’t take me long to develop a crush.
But alas, time was not on our side in the 90s. I graduated from high school and went away to college. Over the next few years, I hung out with Nathan’s cousins less and less until all of us eventually drifted apart.
That is, until Facebook. In 2008, browsing lists of “friends of friends,” I found one of Nathan’s cousins and we became reacquainted. Eventually, I started hanging out again with the cousins and their families, and established a renewed friendship with Nathan. Except, there was still that crush I had on him. . . .
For now, I’ll leave you with this brief introduction. There is so much more to our story. Interesting, God-ordained, really cool stuff, that I’ll write more about later.
Just from this much of our story, I can tell you that sometimes God uses a person’s past to bring them a future. And sometimes, He uses years and years to move us and change us and bring us closer to Himself before He brings us closer to others.
Though our paths over the years were not easy, I am grateful, humbled and honored that God brought Nathan and I together in the way that He did.
Read our story from the beginning:
how we met
a dream about my husband
between the dream and dating
meeting my husband again
we tried to date but didn’t
a year of silence
how we became friends again
we started dating . . . for real this time
we got married!
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