About my love

My husband and I probably weren’t supposed to be together.

When we met during my first year of college, I was generally stable and self-possessed, and a little sad. Zac was charismatic and surprising, and definitely not a Christian. He seemed like a bad boy type to me, which I found intriguing–despite his haircut, which at the time was… not good–and which made me keep my distance for two years, since I have a history of getting attached to the wrong people. But my caution didn’t stop me from looking at him from across our music theory classroom most days, laughing at his jokes and admiring his expressive eyebrows and guitar-strumming hands, and wondering what it would be like to be Zac’s friend.

A lot happened in those two years. I changed my major, experienced two (unsurprisingly) anticlimactic romantic disappointments, and faced a faith crisis that had been building since my senior year of high school. Faithful as ever, God brought me out of my dark place, into a realm of peace and mental/physical health that I’d never encountered before.

I should’ve known then that I was being equipped for a big change, because that’s just how God do.

The summer before my junior year, I read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and it supercharged me. I spent a lot of time praying for the opportunity to see someone find Christ, to be able to witness to a lost soul. I prayed, too, for a friend I could trust when I was at school, which had become a lonely and sometimes spiritually desolate place after my sister graduated.

I never expected to find both of those prayers answered in the same person (and this is the part where God chuckles, because he loves tricking people into finding exactly what they need).

But there Zac was, sitting alone in the recital hall on our first day of recitals class, and I sat down next to him on a whim, and from that day onward he was the only person in the music department I was interested in talking to.

It wasn’t really supposed to happen. For much of the first few months of our friendship, I felt like Roxanne Ritchie in that scene from Megamind, where she dumps him in the rain: “You actually got me to care about you!?” I remember coming home for a couple of days over fall break, being completely out of it, and my sister asking me, straight up, “Are you in love with Zac?”

I totally was–not that I would admit that to myself at that point. Things were sticky and complicated then–I couldn’t be in love with Zac, it would just hurt too much.

That’s what I knew, in my brain. But I couldn’t help seeking him out in all of our shared classes, nearly crying with disappointment whenever he wasn’t there, inviting him to come eat with me in the dining hall, praying for him every night as I went to sleep.

And he couldn’t help stopping to talk with me when we should have been going our separate ways in the music building, sending me wholesome memes he thought I’d like, asking me questions about my faith, until he finally found his. Until the light found his eyes again.

I fell in love with Zac in those scarce, in-between moments. I fell in love with him because of his heart for truth, and before that, because of his capacity for grace, and before that, because of his strange and unapologetic sense of humor. And after that, because he listens well, and isn’t afraid to talk about the gritty stuff. Because of his love and care for those who can’t speak for themselves. Because of his strength, his curiosity, his childlike wonder at God’s creation. Because he is the only person I know to cry when he sees a good ol’ mallard just being itself.

Because he loves me, and he isn’t afraid to pursue me, even when I think I need to run away.

The whole story of our relationship is messy. It started with a leap of faith, a step into uncertainty; it grew with pain and soaring heartache and no small amount of stolen fries. And now we’re married, and sometimes I still can’t wrap my mind around how any of it happened. Neither of us are quite the same person that we were when we first started out, and I imagine I’ll have many volumes’ worth of revelations to reflect back on in fifty years.

For now, though, it’s enough to say: I love you, my love. Thank you for being my friend.