I’m in a reflective mood today, writing this post on Monday, February 14, 2022, and thinking about the spirit of this Valentine’s Day. I am so grateful to the Lord for my husband of 27 years!
I recently told my love story to a friend and wondered if my readers might also find it interesting. You might find it unbelievable, but it is the truth.
My parents put me in public school beginning in 6th grade after I’d been in a couple of different private schools for the previous grades. We had recently moved to inner city Houston from the suburbs, and I was terrified. I couldn’t understand why God was allowing my parents to enroll me at Hamilton Middle School in the Heights, but I learned later that they had their reasons… and perhaps God had His.
My 6th grade class stayed in pods by last name; almost all my classes were with students whose names ended in A, B, C, or D.
Seventh grade was different, however. The alphabet got all mixed together, and we were finally able to share classes with our peers who were in different homerooms from our own, which were still in alpha order.
About a week or two into 7th grade, in Life Science, our teacher was trying to give us a demonstration on how to dissect something (probably a cow’s eye) while we all scurried to get the previous lab report finished, in order and turned in.
There was a lot of background shuffling of papers and murmurs as I strained to see what my teacher was doing. (I’ve never been very good at science, and I knew I needed to pay special attention!) In all the cacophony, I heard a boy’s voice distinctly ask someone, “What is her name?” Then, “Nancy! Please hand me that stapler.” In that moment, a still, small voice also spoke to me and said, “And that will be your husband.”
I knew the second voice belonged to the Lord.
I slowly turned around to see who had been calling me and found a student with his hand stretched out expectantly towards me for a stapler that had been in front of me. He was scruffy looking with thick, dark, straight hair, wearing a loose T-shirt and glasses, and we had never met before. I’m not even sure that we had noticed each other before that moment.
The rest of the day was a haze to me, as I went through the motions of school thinking, “No one will believe me. It’s too incredible.”
Sometimes my sister’s then-boyfriend Doddy would pick me up from school. He knew I despised riding the bus, and if he was not working, he’d wait for me in his truck at the edge of the football field near where we boarded busses. He was there waiting for me that day.
I climbed into the truck, he asked me how my day had been, and I spilled the beans. Doddy was a believer, and he agreed to keep it confidential.
I don’t think I told anyone else my story for many years, knowing it would be discounted, but I gradually began a friendship with Daniel that grew closer and closer until I counted him as one of my two best friends.
We chose to attend different high schools, but his best guy friend, who was attending the same high school as him, and my best girl friend, who was enrolled at my high school, were twins, and I had sat beside them for three years of homeroom. Daniel and I had lots of opportunities to maintain our friendship, and it remained firmly in the camp of friendship even though my heart was growing more and more attached to him.
We counseled each other on the few people we dated or wanted to date, gave advice to each other on various relationship issues, and palled around when our group of friends gathered on the weekends and in the summer.
Daniel reluctantly escorted me to a formal our junior year, grumbling all the while about the cost of his tux and the meager portion of food on his plate at our fancy dinner with my fancy friends (so I paid for not one, but two dinners that night), and I still loved him.
Maybe this will be Part 1 of our love story. I’ll tell Part 2 next week.
I realize that my hubby sees our past through very different eyes than mine, but I’m telling the absolute truth here—the story through my own eyes. It’s my blog after all 😉
