It’s time to tell you a story.

In the fall of 2007, I left work on a Sunday (yes, I worked on Sundays for my first two-and-a-half years in New York, and God understood) and walked six blocks south from my office on 75th and Lexington to meet AW in the lobby at Hunter College for the Redeemer East Side PM service.  She mentioned a guy who would be meeting us there, a friend of hers who had lived in the city two years ago and recently moved back.  Since I’m never in the mood to meet new people, this news wasn’t exactly welcome, but I was in God’s house (or at least His rented auditorium) so technically I couldn’t complain. Etiquette and all.  I noticed a guy standing against the wall opposite us, about fifteen feet away, and I poked AW.  Turned out that was her friend.  A.K.A. my future husband.

It wasn’t love at first sight.  For one thing, neither of us was available (though my unavailability was more the emotional sort, a product of habitual bad decisions and their resulting despair). And this guy seemed nice enough, but I was more into assholes at the time.  I probably went home that night and thought more about the jerk who wasn’t calling me than Future Husband.

At a bar a couple of weeks later, that changed.  FH and I ended up sitting beside each other for the course of an SEC football game.  He’s more into the NFL and I’m more into…well, things I understand, so we wound up talking for hours.  Never before had I found it so easy to talk to a relative stranger: we bounced witty repartee off each other so rapidly it felt like a verbal Wimbledon.  I didn’t have time to get bored or distracted; I had to stay on my A-game.  I am super funny around this guy! I realized with glee as we discussed our favorite movies and music.  Over the next few weeks, we became email buddies, and it turned out I was just as hilarious online.  More important, he was, and I began to get really excited whenever I saw his name in bold on my Gmail.  Too excited…

On a late fall afternoon, just before the time of year when sitting outside became a request for frostbite, JS and I met at Dip on the corner of 30th and 3rd for happy hour.  It was champagne night, and we were buying.  Three $3 glasses later, I told her my secret:  I had a crush on FH.  She squealed, being a friend to both of us, and cited our perfectly matching senses of humor.  Then she really screwed with my head–she said, “You’re totally going to get married!”

“Oh ha ha HA! Ha…” I replied, walking home on a cloud of champagne-buzz and the realization that I had better start being honest with myself: this was not just a crush.  For the next few weeks, I fell a little more each day, sitting behind my computer screen or staring at my cell phone and reading his words.  THIS is the guy, I told God.  Just FYI. He must have looked at his watch and smiled, shaking His head. I had visions of FH meeting my family, going on trips with us, of how perfectly he would fit in.  A little help here? I prayed, wondering what to do. I was not a brave person, I knew that.  Being honest with myself was hard enough, but being honest with someone else involved the possibility of rejection.  And yet I knew that I wasn’t doing either of us any favors by not telling the truth. But…how?

Unfortunately, I turned to my old friend champagne for help.  And that confession was followed by a hard conversation during sober hours the next day. And for the next year, because the guy I loved was trying to do the right thing, I had to let go.  I couldn’t even call it waiting, because I had no reason to hope things would change.  But for the first time in my life for such a matter, my conscience was clean: I had told the truth; I had not clung on in desperation; my hands were not bloodied from attempts to claw my plan into actuality; there was no surgical extraction required by God to get me to move on.  I just surrendered. Maybe because I was growing up, but also because I felt a sense of rightness about this guy being in my life in whatever capacity I could have him.  This surrender marked a turning point for me: all my life, I had clamored for and cried over what I wanted, harboring a hidden resentment toward God and everyone else when I didn’t get it.  And in the end, I never did get it anyway.  So I took the grand leap of faith that maybe I didn’t know everything, and I sat still and let greater forces work on my heart.  I learned to wait on grace, and I found a kind of waiting that, instead of bitterness and cynicism, leads to friendship and trust. And for a girl who thinks that her car’s GPS lady may have a secret plan to get her lost, trust is hard to come by.  But I found it: in God, in myself, in FH.  He became one of my best friends and favorite people.  And I don’t even like people.

A year later, he kissed me.  Two years later, we were engaged.  Cut to us this year, getting married, buying a house, talking about kids, going on trips with my family (he fits in perfectly) and running around a corn maze with the nephews, getting lost.  I think about what I will tell my niece, and our daughter if we have one, about the pursuit of love: how for so long I worked so hard to find it, when all along it was meant to find me.  How it looks nothing like fear or desperation but sure can feel like stillness and faith.  How often I’ve stood in the middle of my life with a map of my own making, thinking I knew just the way to go, and how much of the time I was dead lost and didn’t even know it.  How, when it mattered and when it was meant to, love located me and wrote its chapter of my life itself, after a little wrestling to get the pen from my hand, and now The Husband and I have something stronger than our own wisdom and deeper than our own sentiment holding us together.  That’s a story worth telling.