July 13, 2006

• Our Story, continued.

  (When last I left off here in our story, God had led us to San Diego…)

  So in late October, with eager obedience, we both packed our belongings and traveled the distance to be reunited in sunny San Diego. 

  Is Sam really the one?

  It was probably a month after Sam and I had both arrived in San Diego that I started asking this question quite seriously.  Already, we had seen how God had pulled out all the stops in order to bring us to be in the same place at the same time.  All I had to do to remember that it was a God-thing was do a little journal-flipping and I would find all those entries from when Sam was overseas and I was in the States and how I had written over and over again of the improbability that he and I could ever be together.

  But from across the hundreds and thousands of miles, our hearts had met, and we had come to recognize that God was the one who had already spanned the distance for us by weaving into our hearts, our minds, our lives the very same vision for the nations years and years before.  The early emails which had given us small bursts and glimpses into each other’s hearts were brought to more depth and definition by the later weekly phone conversations that never seemed to last long enough.  They were then confirmed in our first meeting together in San Francisco and our second in Dallas… and then at last, we were living in the same suburb in San Diego, ten minutes away from each other.  How God had spanned the distance!

  But brought together into close proximity, we had to learn, at last, the ordinary day-to-day things about each other that had been previously lost between the miles.  Two people who have grown up in completely different places, with different backgrounds and different experiences will have different ways of doing things.  There’s no getting around that.  And we found ourselves seeing less “me too”s and more of “is that you?”s.  We were different.   From the way we wash the dishes to the way we shop for food at the grocery store to the way we make decisions about little and big things and the way we take in the world – we were different!  And it was a hard pill to swallow because we had grown so accustomed to believing that we were so similar. 

  So… was God really bringing us together for the rest of our lives?  How do you take two completely different people and bring them together to become one?  The more time we spent together discovering new things about each other, the more different we seemed to be from each other, and the more impossible it seemed to me that this marriage thing could ever work for anybody! 

  Is Sam really the one you have for me, Lord? 

  Click here for the continuation of the story.
  

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