I can remember, and feel, what it was like to fall in love with you.
Summer of 2016.
The string of numbers representing a year has never meant as much to me as those do.
The year I was born is the only other string that meant anything to me at that point, but all that was just a habit of saying it.
That summer, I was optimistic. I was happy. I was so happy to be back at Rockmont.
It was nowhere near my imagination that I’d fall in love and get married within the next 18 months. Or, begin what I believe to be a lifetime of calling Black Mountain home and building our family here.
I said to you the other day, and it still baffles me, that it is almost painful to imagine that just a few more minutes delay, or an interruption somewhere else, could have intercepted our running into each other around Lake Eden that evening.
Maybe, as you said, we still would have still managed to find another way.
But imagining a few minutes being the difference maker in our falling in love, beginning a life together, going through COVID, having Shepherd, having Greta, changing jobs, the miscarriage, Hurricane Helene, the beautiful redemption of Goldie, and now being really grounded and present in our life today makes it all feel so much more profound and vulnerable and precious. I like feeling all of that. It makes realize how good we have it; how good of a gift you are.
I can hardly believe that the universe, through God’s love, could be slowed and arranged in such a way.
Okay, a few things I like/admire/love/enjoy about you:
- You fundamentally lean towards enjoying life
- All the creative ways you create new songs and jingles like the kids’ name songs. What joy in our lives!
- Although I’ve never heard it, it’s so fun that you have very serious conversations with yourself
- Love that running and teaching at the Y is so important to you. And you’re very good at them both
- You are a really good friend. Watching you hang with your friends and talk after church, I just see how you are the reason we are anchored so closely to our friend group and you are the reason I’ve gotten so close with my friends. You got us in there. I’m so grateful for that!
- Man, no way I try to characterize how funny you are will be good enough. We’re synced up.
- Also I love how we always have like next-word-prediction on and can just know what each of us is going to say. I don’t think that’s as much explained by the fact we’re with each other all of the time as it is with something to do with love.
- You’re an unbelievable mom. So deep, loving, patient, and formational with the kids.
I love you so much. I’m so proud to be your husband. So grateful that people stop me in Ingles and make fun of me for not being at the Y as much as you are (they have something right here in our order of things).
I’m so lucky. Really.
And I think the about the odds of us running into each other around Lake Eden that night and beginning our life right then…
I can’t decide if it was inevitable that it would be so, or if we beat the odds in an absolute way.
Maybe it’s both.
Because it feels like in order for me to understand it, and to appreciate it, the fact that I got you and you got me, it can only be the luckiest thing in the world and the most ordered thing in the world at the same time.
I love you.
Happy 30th birthday!
We’ll go to Michigan soon.
