Our Love Story
We first met at our church’s college/young adult group. Kevin talked his best friend Travis into coming over and talking to me, and then smoothly interjected himself in the conversation. I meanwhile was completely oblivious to his intentions and totally consumed by paying attention to my current heart throb who was complicating my life in a heart break. I scanned Kevin and Travis up and down, determined they were both way too old for me and while friendly company wrote them off completely in my mind….to the point of not even remembering who Kevin was when we met again months later.
5 months later….
Let me set the stage for you. It’s August in Oregon. i.e. it’s smothering dry hot here. Bake your brains off, don’t touch your bare feet to that pavement or your gonna pay kinda hot. I’m 18, just graduated, and quickly approaching the one year “anniversary” of when me and the guy whom I was breaking my heart had gotten together. But we hadn’t spoken in months.
Waa??
I know….I know.
Somewhere around month three of our beautiful relationship my “prince charming’s” mother decided after having met me twice that I was not a good person for her son to be around. Now on one hand I have a strong personality…but this was beyond anything I had ever seen.
I had been church hopping around for the summer trying to find a church that I liked. And I really wanted to go to the Sunday service but….”charming’s” family would be there….ugh.
I finally decided to go one Sunday and absolutely loved it. They had this video about their new “family camp” that was at one of the camps a couple hours away that looked intriguing. But it was $110…and I was a broke newly graduated working part time kinda girl. So I’m sitting there in church contemplating this when clear as day, as if someone was standing behind me talking to me I heard, “use your tithe money.” I looked around a little weirded out and shrugged it off, people don’t talk to you out of the blue and you certainly don’t use your tithe money to pay for camp. Not to mention that I had my hesitations about being trapped at a camp where I knew virtually no one and having “her” show up and chew me out.
I fired off an email to the church’s website that night and was somewhat relieved when no one replied. Thursday night was college group and I was bombarded with people asking me to come. Someone offered to coordinate me a ride, told me I could pay later and told me to get off work. I reluctantly agreed but told everyone I would never be able to get Saturday off at the retail shop I worked at, especially not the day before.
I went to work the next day and asked my boss who promptly told me it was not possible. I sighed in relief again….but this time a smidgen disappointed. An hour later my boss appeared saying, “he had changed his mind and I better get out of his shop and have a good time at this camp of mine.”
So that was that. I was picked up by a couple that I didn’t know, who ended up being engaged and hilarious. He was 40 years old and she was 25 which we had a good laugh about. We got lost halfway to camp and ended up having to drive a couple extra hours to get to camp which put us there after dark.
As we pulled into camp we were blinded with a flashlight and greeted. The person behind that flashlight….my future husband.
Who spent the remainder of the weekend asking me to play cribbage with him and tried his best to engage me, while I tried my best to stay away from him because I thought he was too old for me. 
Little did I know that my ride was playing matchmaker and decided to get mysteriously “sick” and leave early. But not before they arranged to have me ride home with Kevin and his parents.
I tried everything to get into another ride home….even volunteering to ride with all the middle schoolers and no seatbelt, to no avail. So I piled into their SUV and busied myself with talking to his mom….while Kevin acted all cool and uninterested in the front seat.
I assumed he had finally realized how old I was.
The conversation rolled around to rock climbing, my new found passion that I had no friends interested in. Kev offered to take me out sometime and so at the end of the drive we exchanged numbers.
The next day I tracked down “charming” and told him that he wasn’t so charming and got my check from work…..which was exactly $1100.00
Kevin called me later that week, took me rock climbing and cooked me dinner….and as they say, the rest is history.
