We all have mountains in our lives. I’m sharing this story of how God brought me and my husband together–despite mountains of shyness, living in the boonies, and other challenges–to encourage you with this truth: Our God is a mountain mover. Today, after years of busy, contented singleness, we finally see some romantic action…

 Finally, that sacred day came. My parents seemed anxious for my siblings to get to bed, and I got the impression Dad had something up his sleeve. We’d just been to a civil war ball and every one was in high excitement, us sisters goofing off in our hoopskirts and remembering the fierce competition of the Nine Pin Dance. When the final bobby pin had been extracted from curly up-do’s and the last of my younger sister’s tired feet had tromped up the stairs to bed, Dad tilted his head toward the living room and told me to sit down.

And I heard the words I’d been waiting to hear for 22 years. “Someone has asked to court you.” Suddenly the air in the room seemed a little lighter and my breath felt shallow. This was it. I knew this was a moment I would remember the rest of my life. The yellow couch, the hoopskirts scattered on the wood floors, the kitchen light shining irreverently in my eyes—all of this was cemented in my mind because I knew my life would be different from this moment.

Now I should just give you a little background into some terms and definitions. I didn’t believe in casual dating. I felt if a guy and girl were going to spend focused, one-on-one time together, it should be with the purpose of deciding if they’d like to spend the rest of their life together. In the circles I grew up in, this was called courting. Now, I call it dating-with-a-purpose, or just dating, ‘cause we’re all a little tired of the word ‘courtship’.

That’s why some guy asking to court me was so significant—just this side of engagement, actually—because it meant he was seriously looking for a wife, and thought I might be ‘it’. This wasn’t just some guy asking to take me out to dinner. He wasn’t just window shopping. He was ready to see if I was the one.

And that brings us to the guy himself – who was he? I know y’all are thinking it’s Jeremy, or at least someone I knew and maybe even had a teensy, tiny crush on. You’d be wrong. He was a fellow from a sister church a few hours away who I’d seen maybe 3 times—I actually didn’t even know his last name.

Dad filled me in a bit on the guy—he’d been getting to get to know him a bit—then asked me what I thought. I looked from him to mom with a silly grin on my face. I felt honored, excited, but mostly I was just in shock. Dad told me it was entirely up to me if I wanted to get to know the guy. Then, ‘cause there wasn’t anything else to do, we went to bed.

Here I’d really like to fast-forward about 8 months and just say ‘We dated for a while, found we weren’t compatible, broke up, and moved on’, because that’s just what happened. But that would hardly do the story justice. You need to know that, with my no-nonsense view of the dating process, as soon as I felt the Lord’s go-ahead for the relationship, I was pretty much a goner. The relationship consumed me. I reveled in the idea that someone had finally chosen me, and that it looked like there would be a wedding in my near future, that someday soon I would become a wife and even a mother. All the dreams I’d cherished since girlhood were within my grasp. I was in love, and in love with being in love. Then, in one day, everything turned upside down. The Lord led me out of the relationship just as quickly and clearly as He’d led me in. It felt like a death.

When you grow up with a courting mindset, you begin to get the impression that if you follow all the rules, you’ll get to the altar safely without any of that yucky stuff like broken hearts. The pain I felt in the next few months was not just from losing someone I loved, but the destruction of a dream—an ideal, that I had built my life around. Slowly I came to realize that this was not the end of my life, but very likely the beginning of a much better story—one in which I understood that sometimes God’s plan includes a broken heart, and gearing your whole life to avoid pain is no way to live.

And so I entered my 23rd year with a bit of tenderness still around the scar, but a small trust in a God who’d kept me alive through the hardest life experience I’d had yet, and an even smaller hope that there was, indeed, a man out there for me.

Good thing I still had a little faith left, because this was the year Jeremy and I finally noticed each other.

Want to hear more about what I learned from my first relationship? I’ve written an article for YLCF about how I believe that there is no such thing as a failed courtship. You can find it here: Courtship–Dispelling the Myths.

Did you marry the first guy you ever dated? If not, what did you learn from the experience? Was there a time in your journey where you lost hope in ever finding a mate, or being found? Maybe you’re there now. From one who’s been through a deep valley on this journey, I just wanna tell you to keep hanging on. God’s writing a story with your life that you can trust—after all, He IS a best selling author.

Share/Bookmark

I’ve told you about my mountain — that seeming impossible situation in my life, of moving to the wilderness in my teens and wondering how I’d ever meet any eligible young men. I also told you the beginning of how God began to move that mountain, pebble by pebble. Today I’m gonna add a bit more drama (or, as it may turn out, lack of drama) and tell you about a large cliff on the side of my mountain – a sheer, nearly un-scalable rock face we’re gonna call “The Wall”. The shadow of this Wall loomed threateningly over my future love life, filling the path with stumbling blocks, and the fissures with fear:

I was shy, people.

From a young age, painfully so. As I matured and my parents endeavored to teach me social skills, I learned to shake hands, make eye contact, even (oh, agony) introduce myself. By the time I was in my teens, it looked like I was over my shyness and well adjusted. But inside I was a twisted bunch of nerves, full of fear that I looked wrong, talked wrong, and wouldn’t be accepted. In groups or with anyone but close family and friends, I was the one on the outside, quietly looking in, watching, and hoping no one expected me to say anything.

{Those who know me now will probably think that this is where I decided to insert a bit of fiction to make my story better, for nowadays I’m usually the one in the center of the group, talking the loudest! I’m quite a different person now, and it had a lot to do with this journey}

That’s why when our new friend, Tom, invited us to visit his Church, I was content to stay home and play dolls and feed chickens.

OK, it wasn’t that bad. I guess I would have liked to go, a little bit. But it was my turn to babysit.

The chickens, not the dolls.

You see, just about a year into our homestead experience, despite our attempts to plan and save, our savings were running low, and though we still did not feel quite ready (the house wasn’t done, we didn’t have a driveway or any outbuildings), it was time to jump into some entrepreneurial endeavors. Having a close friend who knew Joel Salatin, we were introduced to the idea of raising grass-fed chickens. Two-thirds of our land was open meadow, and chickens didn’t seem like rocket science, so we dove in. My dad and brothers spent some time at Polyface farm and then came back to the homestead to turn it into a chicken farm.

That’s a story in itself right there, let me tell you. But for the sake of this story, I’ll skip over that to the summer I was 15, and the brooder house was full of 200 little peeping chicks who, at just a week old, needed almost hourly attention. The propane heater must be checked, feed trays filled, waterers unclogged, temperature adjusted — whenever my family went anywhere during brooding season, someone had to stay home with the chicks. This Sunday it was my turn.

And the thing was — I was OK with that. See, in addition to being shy and fearful of meeting new people, I also didn’t really care about growing up. Maybe I was afraid of that, too, and figured if I pretended I was younger it would delay the process? Who knows, but that Sunday, as my family piled into the suburban and spun through the mud down the driveway, leaving me alone in the middle of 150 acres for the whole day, I was giddy inside.


This meant I had the dollhouse all to myself.

All day, while my family met new friends and made pivotal connections with people that would bring us closer to meeting my future husband, I was sitting on my sister’s bed, playing happily with her dollhouse in between runs to the brooder to check on the chicks.

And STILL my God was able to find a man for me, and — eventually– get us to talk to each other, and then — but I’m getting ahead of myself. Next time I’ll tell you about the first time I set eyes on my future husband…

Share/Bookmark