Boy Meets Girl

For Jon on our 11^th Anniversary

(This post is part of the Redemption Story Project, which you can view here. )

In the fall of 1997 I sat in front of a Northwestern College library computer. I was talking to it, the computer that is, giving the fat monitor and its mystery-to-me software a piece of my non-techy, English Major mind.

Sitting at the computer next to me was my husband-to-be. We hadn’t met yet. I didn’t even know his name.

He, on the other hand, knew my name, though he didn’t tell me at the time. As he told me months later: “The other football players were talking about you in the cafeteria and they pointed you out and told me your name, but I couldn’t tell you that!” . . . .

So this boy-stranger sat in the chrome-and-plastic library chair next to me, and in the midst of my computer tirade, he leaned over and whispered in my ear:

“The problem isn’t the computer. It’s the person staring at the screen . . . .”

I turned from the blue screen in front of me and wide-eyed stared at the brazen, blond-headed freshman leaning back in his chair with a smirk on his face. He was wearing a gold chain round his neck and a white T-shirt with a picture of the cartoon-character-Hobbes gleefully flushing little-boy-Calvin down a toilet.

I couldn’t let this big boy’s insult linger too long in the air, so I glanced past his blue eyes to the computer screen behind him, and seeing a muscle-flexing picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger I responded,

“Well, at least I’m not a metal-head!”

And with a toss of my shoulder-length brown hair, I turned back to my computer, propped my elbows on the desk in front of me, and stared straight ahead.

But this boy leaned across the open space between us and gently squeezed my flexed bicep with his fingers, saying, “Wow, it looks like you work out!”

I recoiled, flinging my tan bicep towards my chest, nearly smacking myself in the face with my own hand. My cheeks flamed as I said: “Don’t touch me! You’re a stranger!”

And the boy laughed saying, “Hi. I’m Jon, what’s you’re name?”

“Becca” somehow escaped my lips, and he replied, “Well then, now we aren’t strangers. I know your name, you know mine.”

And so, we met for the first time in the NWC computer lab, in 1997, and the rest is history. . . . Sort of. (Is it ever really that simple?)  

He was 18. I was 19, and as Jon puts it, “We were really immature back then!”

But from that first moment in the computer lab, I liked the fresh football player from Northern Minnesota. He was funny and honest—he didn’t try the flatter-a-girl-to-get-her-to-go-out-with-you kind of crap. He didn’t perform. He just was . . . himself.

That computer-lab-encounter year,  Jon and I began “accidentally” meeting up at the library to “study.” That’s how I found out he was a public-schooled German Christian with a back-woods vocabulary and a philosopher’s mind. He didn’t care about grades and he always asked why. I thought that--asking why—made him a rebel, and I wanted to be a rebel like that.

And I, I was a homeschooled Preacher’s kid from the Midwest who cared about pleasing my parents and making straight A’s. I was a prisoner to other people’s opinions, forever an actor on a stage—performing the dreams and desires of others. But secretly I longed to  live the God-given beauty of my own breath, thoughts, and feelings.  

With Jon, perhaps for the first time in my life, I could just breathe and be the me that God created.   

We laughed together, ran miles of road together (I left him on a park bench in the middle of nowhere, once, and he still ran after me), drank way too many mochas at Caribou Coffee together, and talked about our mutual struggle to fill the hollow spaces in our hearts with God.

And, somehow, Jon saw in me what so many others didn’t: I longed to draw God close, but I didn’t know how, was too scared to try. So, out of fear, I kept God and others from filling the open, hollow spaces in my heart.

And, just as he did in the computer lab so long ago, Jon reached across the hollow, open spaces in my heart, drawing me close, talking about God and life in a way I’d never heard before—intimately, personally.  After our first summer home from college, Jon shared how he talked with God as he worked alone all summer, re-building his Dad’s garage. He shared how his talks with God led him to change his college major from Kinesiology to Bible.

And even though Jon’s parents thought his degree-changing was “crazy,” he took that step of faith because he knew God was in it. And that school year, as I watched Jon follow God’s plan for him, I realized Jon’s faith was for real—his own, separate from his parents.  

But my God was inextricably tied to my parents. The God I knew lived in my parents daily sermons and the pages of the Bible. God did not live in the day-to-day joys and pains of my life, my heart. Or, at least, I’d never felt His presence in that flesh-and-spirit kind of way.  

But I wanted to know Jon’s God—a God who lived close, intermingling flesh and spirit.

And ever since the day Jon and I finally became one flesh at Immanuel Baptist Church,  a country-like church in a the heart of a Minneapolis neighborhood, he’s shown me what it means to know God like that—in flesh and in spirit, in head and in heart.

And the very thing that drew me to Jon back in 1997—his ability to see, share, and pursue the heart-honest-truth about God and Self, no matter the cost--has freed me to do the same.  I’ve come to know God in the day-to-day of my life’s joys and pains. I’ve learned to see God move in flesh and spirit, drawing me close, and closer still. 

And with a husband like Jon, I know the next eleven years will bring more Calvin-and-Hobbes humor, more rebel-like discussions over a cup of Starbucks about the whys of life, and an even deeper awareness of God-with-us, every day, every hour, every moment.

“And the two will become one flesh, so they are no longer two but one.” (Mark 10:8)

Happy 11^th Anniversary, my love. 

 

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Redemption Story Project Writing Assignment #6

"If God truly is good beyond our wildest imagining and if God takes evil and uses it for good, then how God redeems the tragedies of our lives will be nothing sort of glorious. We may not see the redemption in this lifetime. But then again, God just may do the redeeming right now. Our tragedy is also our redemption. God allows tragedy because he can use it to soften our hearts and make them more his own. . . . We can't love in a way that is truly selfless until we are broken. "(To Be Told, 96).

Part 1: Think back over your life to instances of "shalom (peace) shattered," when tragedy, no matter how minor/major, struck? Think about the first kid who hurt your feelings/called you a name in school, think about hurts from your parents (intentional or not), think about different forms of loss you've experienced (loss of relationships, loss of a loved one, etc.) How has God used tragedy in your life to draw you to himself?

Part 2: Write out the story of one of your life's tragedies. Capture how you felt/responded to the situation at the time. Now, think about and then explain how God has used that tragedy for good in your life.