Writing about how I fell in love is a welcome project after how it felt to write the previous chapter! In order to tell this story though, we have to go back and fill in some gaps because my soul mate and best friend has been a part of my life since I was 14 years old, and weathered every storm of my teenage years right by my side. Our love story, however, was NOT easy. My now-husband and I went through more in our dating years than we have ever even begun to go through as a married couple.
I met him for the first time at the start of a singing practice for our touring group (which I explained in much detail in the previous chapter!). Our singing group had a one-hour practice once a week where we would learn new music or practice for upcoming tours. As I’ve mentioned before, I was the only constant of this group. Seeing as how everyone else in it was a program kid, the faces would continually be changing…kids could get kicked out of the group if they were being punished, or obviously if they left the program, they would need to be replaced. One day, as we were all gathering for practice, my sister (who was our group’s director) turned our attention to a boy who had just come in the room.
“Everyone welcome Mike! He’s the newest member of our group!” I took a look at him. I had seen him before…he was a program boy, relatively new. All I had known about him previously was that he had a strange little blonde spot on the top of his head, in the midst of the rest of his brown hair. I had also thought all that time for some reason that his name was Matt. I clapped along with everyone else, welcoming this new not-Matt person who had a blonde spot on his head, into our group…not knowing at that moment that he was going to become the most important person in my life. I would also come to find out that his “blonde spot” was his birthmark where for some reason, that chunk of hair never got any pigment….fun fact!
I hadn’t yet become a super boy-crazy girl at that point…but I had had my share of crushes, usually on boys in my singing group, because those were the people I spent most of my time with. There weren’t any rules against staff kids being in relationships with program kids, but everyone knew that there could be no boyfriends and girlfriends within the same group. This kept most “crushes” at bay for most kids in singing groups…because if you did end up dating each other, one person would get moved to another group to avoid vans traveling around filled with a bunch of love birds not focusing on why they’re out doing what they’re doing. At the time of Mike’s arrival in our group, I actually had a crush on another boy that sang with us. Even weirder, he was really good friends with that guy. So his initial perspective of me was probably that I was the naive little staff kid who liked his friend. Ha!
As we began to tour together, I gradually realized that Mike was insanely cool. I often tell the story of the first words I can actually recall him saying to me, because it’s hilarious. I remember that we were standing in a church lobby, waiting like we usually did after a performance, to shake people’s hands as they left the sanctuary. He was next to me when all of a sudden he leaned in and whispered into my ear…”You might want to move over, because I farted and it really stinks.”
Now, for whatever reason, I think a huge part of me fell in love with him at that moment!! Unlike most girls, who would say or think “Gross!” and classify him as a weirdo, I thought it was just so cool that he would not care so much about what other people thought of him. Looking back now, I can see how that totally makes sense because I saw something in him that was so attractive that I didn’t have, and that was being totally free from the fear of what others think. Since I lived my entire existence always being paranoid, embarrassed and insecure, I became really interested in this guy who seemed to never be insecure.
It didn’t take long for us to become really, really close. Remember that in this group, everyone had to be comfortable with sharing their full stories, hundreds and hundreds of times, in front of whoever we were performing for, as well as in front of their peers in the group. I began to hear Mike’s story over and over again. In a nutshell (because I’m not trying to tell anyone’s story but mine!) he was 17, and had come into the program because he had been addicted to drugs. His was a wild story, so very unlike my own. It did make sense once I got to know him though, that his life could have been so derailed at such a relatively young age. He was hilarious and fearless. He would do anything, and I mean absolutely anything, anyone dared him to do. After coming into the program my family worked at, he knelt at the altar one night and accepted salvation, just like I did when I was 9 years old. He made progress in the program, rising in the levels system (see Chapter 4!) fairly quickly. He would do things that needed to be done, or things he was asked to do, without wanting to be noticed or needing other people’s approval. I guess in a lot of ways, he was the total opposite of me! I was a little girl who existed in fear, insecurity and a very unhealthy need to please everyone. The more I spent time with Mike, the more I saw someone who possessed qualities that I didn’t even know I needed. It didn’t take long for us to become very, very close friends. In our 12 passenger van that we spent SOOO much time in, everyone usually sat in the same seats. It was sort of an unspoken claiming of the seats, and I always sat in the second row window seat. Pretty soon, Mike was always sitting in the third row window seat, directly behind me. I loved that he sat there! At the beginning of a 5 day tour, we would all pile into the van, and I would set up my pillow leaning against the window and sit sideways. Mike would take his seat and would usually sit with his arms crossed on the back of my seat, leaning forward, and we would talk every minute of every drive. We claimed we both “couldn’t sleep” in vans, so on long trips that required a 12 hour drive, the whole van would be asleep and we would stay awake the whole drive talking and mostly laughing. I remember so many times we would laugh until tears streamed down our cheeks as we tried to be quiet enough to not wake any one else up, lest they try to get in on our good time. We joked that we had a special “wavelength” that only the two of us were on. Everyone knew we were best friends, and we spent such a long time like that, without really wanting to be anything romantic, because we knew that if we dated each other, one of us would have to leave the group…and that just couldn’t happen. Mike remained a constant in my life, and we grew closer and closer. We listened to each other share our stories in countless schools, churches, jails and detention centers. I saw him pray with inmates and addcits at these jails who identified with him and his story, and he watched me as I prayed with church kids who had heard my own story.
I was around 15 when I started to notice that I liked Mike as more than a friend. I began to spend extra time on my makeup and appearance in the morning because I was only thinking about seeing him that day. We grew so close that I was thinking about him ALL the time. It was pretty obvious to each of us that we really liked one another, but the fact remained that if we did end up dating, we knew one of us would leave our beloved group and we wouldn’t be able to tour together…and that felt like the worst possible scenario. So for many years, we simply enjoyed being great friends who got to spend tons of time together. Also, for some reason everyone seemed to have a problem with his being 4 years older than me. It’s silly now, but when I was 16, he was 20, so my parents…and of course, the pastor…had a problem with that. We kept our friendship at a delicate balance between being the VERY best of friends and being completely head over heels in love for years. We even often joked and labeled our friendship as “complicated”…and it really was. It’s hard to describe now looking back, but it was such a confusing time. I knew I loved him, and I was pretty sure he loved me, but I was always afraid that if I did tell him how I really felt, he might tell me that he saw me as a “little sister” and I’d just go jump off a cliff.
From the time I was 14-17, everyone seemed content with us being friends. My sister, our group’s director, probably had it the hardest. She knew (as I’m sure everyone else did) that we were madly in love…but she ran our group, and she did NOT want one of us to have to leave. I was the group’s lead singer, and Mike was a really strong singer who could sing whatever part anyone needed him to, flipping from bass to tenor to anywhere in between. It was sort of an unspoken thing to keep us just friends for as long as possible, and those years were the best for us, by far. In one sense, it was torturous because I felt like we would never get out from under the “friend zone,” but in another sense, I loved that I saw him all the time. Mike had also really melded into my family like he belonged. My parents threw parties often for the singing groups, and Mike would come to my house all the time. Almost every weekend, he would come over for dinner or something, and we would hang out all day and evening. By this time, he had reached the level of Junior Staff in the program, and was in training to be a Dean in the boy’s dorm. The position of a Dean was one of the higher ups in this ministry. It was considered a huge honor to become a dean, because they worked the most one-on-one with the program kids. Mike had alot of responsibilities, and the list was growing. He had a huge heart for the boys in the dorm and had decided that even though he completed his program when he was 18, that he would stay indefinitely and work as staff. (Something nearly EVERY program kid who completed the program did, but more on that later.) Somehow though, at the same time, he continued to fly under the radar…always doing what needed to be done, but without sucking up or trying to earn validation from our pastor’s ever-watchful eyes. At this same time, I was getting into the harder years of my life, and Mike was along for the ride with me. One thing I will never forget is my first experience of hauling wood…which I talked about in my last chapter…and Mike was on security that night, and many nights that I did this humiliating punishment. That meant that as I walked in circles carrying my log in the midst of a bunch of program kids, he was patrolling the campus as “security” (there was always full-time security on campus because the pastor was literally convinced he was on a terrorist hit list) and I had to be seen by the boy I loved more than anything, being totally humiliated.
Every year, instead of a prom, the seniors in the program’s school would have a special “Senior Banquet.” It was big deal because girls and guys had one night where they could interact with the opposite sex. Since Mike had dropped out of high school before coming into the program, he had to complete 4 years of school starting at age 17. In true “Mike fashion,” he worked his butt off and ended up graduating at 21, the year before I graduated. It was his year for the Senior Banquet, and by some miracle, he was allowed to take ME as his date! I was beyond thrilled. I found the most beautiful light green dress, got my hair professionally done, and we went to the banquet together, having the time of our lives. That night, he had gotten permission to come back to my house to hang out for a bit (of course, just as friends…hehe) before going back to his dorm. What happened that night would be our first taste of the Hell we would go through when our relationship became official. It was a beautiful early summer evening, and we were riding high from a perfect night at the banquet together. We came back to my house and the two of us decided to sit out front on my porch together, something we did often. My house had a great porch, with rocking chairs and a swinging seat, facing the quiet road that we lived on. My family was inside the house, and we sat out on the porch together, in separate rocking chairs, just talking and finishing out the night.
The next morning, all Hell broke loose. When I got to school, I learned that my life had been flipped upside down. The night before, when Mike and I had been sitting out on the porch together, one of the ministry’s staff people had driven by and saw us. Immediately, they went to our pastor and told him that we were unsupervised out there and doing who knows what. I never found out all the details of whatever rumor that person made up about us, but by the next morning, our pastor had issued the order that Mike and I were not allowed to speak to each other ever again, and we had both been kicked out of our singing group until further notice. I don’t even have words to describe how crushed I was. Of course, no one ever came to us to ask about it or get our side of the story. No one talked to my parents. This is exactly what the culture of this place was. Not only did we live in fear of our pastor, and that he could do anything he wanted to us based on his mood, but we also had to be fearful of the staff people who it seemed lived to catch people in some kind of act and run to the pastor to report it to him like his good little pets. For every amazing staff person or family that worked there for the right reasons, there was always another kind of staff person who lived for the rewards of gossiping and spreading rumors. This behavior was literally rewarded by the pastor, and only increased the fear and paranoia for those of us who preferred to fly under the radar and desperately wanted to go unnoticed by him. And the cherry on top was that the day all of this happened was Mike’s birthday. I had woken up that day excited to see my best friend, wish him a happy birthday, and give him the gifts I had bought for him. Instead, I was told I couldn’t talk to him anymore, and I was kicked out of my beloved singing group. That day was also graduation, Mike’s graduation, and his birthday, and we both had to sit through that graduation and watch all of the singing groups perform without us. Take note that this was happening simultaneously as everything else was beginning to fall apart in my life, as I explained in the previous chapter. My psyche was taking hit after hit, and we were all powerless to stop anything.
That following summer was a blur, as I went off to Jackson, MS to my ballet intensive for a month, and Mike buried himself in his work at the ministry. At the time, I was 17 and was about to make lots of big life decisions. Everything was so complicated with Mike, I was about to come to my own point of choosing what to do after high school, and worst of all, the incident from that night after the Senior Banquet had put Mike and I on our pastor’s radar…and not in a good way.
I knew as I approached my senior year of high school that I had to decide if I was going to follow the path of singing, or dancing. Throughout my teenage years, I was actually set on leaving the ministry when I graduated to pursue dancing professionally with the ballet company in Mississippi. This added another layer of “complicated” to Mike and I’s relationship. He would always tease me that he’d chop my toes off so I never left to dance. At the same time though, he encouraged me to do only what I knew God’s will for my life was. I was definitely torn between wanting to stay and continue touring and singing (especially with him!) and going after dancing professionally. In the Fall of 2004, I was preparing to audition for that ballet company, and I prayed about it all so much. My heart was as it still is today…just wanting to do whatever it was God wanted me to do. Even though my life seemed to be getting more and more emotionally chaotic, I sought God so fiercely…probably because I was in fear of making the wrong decision and being “out of His will”…but that Fall, I got my answer. As fate would have it, despite training hard in ballet, I was beginning to get really burnt out. I had begun dabbling in eating disorders and ballet was starting to steal my joy, rather than bring it to me. Dancers know what I’m talking about. The instant you lose your joy of dancing, it’s just too hard to keep doing it at the level it takes to be a professional. I was becoming really critical of myself and it was bleeding into the rest of my life. At the same time, my singing was really taking off. I had become as confident a singer as I could be, and I began to love singing more than dancing. Mike and I had also been given our “friendship permission” back and were allowed to travel in our singing group again. For some reason, our pastor had seen fit to forgive us and do something good for us. Often, he would come down hard on someone, and then even by the next day he would be in a good mood and reverse their punishment. It really depended on the day and how his mood was. Lucky for us, one day he was in a good mood and decided to give us our regular lives back…with the lesson learned that we were always being watched.
That Fall, we had a trip to North Carolina where I believe God answered my prayers. We were performing in a church, just as we had hundreds of times before, and I was standing on the stage watching people respond to our message and come kneel at the altar. It was then that I felt God’s unmistakable voice tell me “This is what you need to do.” I had such clarity knowing that at least for the foreseeable future, I would stay in New York, and I would sing. I did continue to dance, but in my heart I knew that I was aiming in a different direction. Mike certainly was happy with my decision! I know that over the course of our 4 year friendship, it had tortured him to think that half of my heart was with dancing, and that would lead to me leaving. It was only a couple of months after that, that I got what I had been secretly wanting for years.
It was a Wednesday, and I was staying home from school because I had a back injury and needed to be on the couch for the day. Over lunch, one of my best friends came over to my house bursting with news. She told me that there were rumors around campus that Mike was going to ask for Talking Permission with me! In Chapter 4, I wrote about how at this place, when people were interested in getting to know each other, the boy would go up on stage in morning chapel and get down on one knee, asking the pastor for his blessing on them to talk for a half an hour per day. GAG.
Anyway, rumor had it that my wildest dreams and hopes had come true and Mike was going to ask for Talking Permission with ME! Thinking about it now, its totally ridiculous that we had to go through that step. We had been best friends for longer than any couple had even ever dated in that place. We certainly knew each other. And little did I know that going through that place’s process for Talking and Dating Permission would almost take us backwards in our relationship. But I didn’t think of any of that…I was just thrilled at the thought of finally being us. Finally being together as a couple. It had been several long years of liking him, having weird intermittent crushes on other guys because I was certain we could never be together, but always knowing in my heart that it had to be Mike. It was always him. That night, my parents came home from church, and I could tell by the looks on their faces that it was going to happen. They said, “I think someone is going to call you tonight, you might wanna sit by the phone!” How funny also to think of those days when hardly anyone had a cell phone! So I sat at the top of my stairs with our house phone in my hand and waited. It rang. I remember my hands being sweaty and shaky as I answered the phone and heard Mike’s voice on the other end. The rest is kind of a blur, and sadly I don’t remember vividly enough exactly what he said to me. But I remember exactly how I felt, and I was overjoyed. He asked me if I wanted to make this finally official, and that he was going to take the knee in chapel the next morning to ask for Talking Permission. It had happened. We were a couple, FINALLY.
Something Mike and I often talk about that is totally unusual for couples, is that from that moment on, that was IT for us. We might as well have gotten married that night he called me, because from that night forward, there was no looking back in our minds. We had finally been given permission to be together, and that was it. We both knew without a shred of a doubt that we would be together for life. What we didn’t know though, was that from that night onward, the next nearly 3 years of dating would be pure Hell. It was almost as if God had prepared us for what we were about to endure at the hands of our pastor and all of his little kronies, by giving us an amazingly solid foundation of deep friendship and ministry together. We knew each other inside and out. But life was about to get very hard for both of us.
I know that my chapters are getting REALLY long, so I’m going to continue this in Chapter 7. This was my story of falling in love. I’m very lucky and honestly a little weird to have only loved one man, to have only had one real relationship. I have known alot of kids who grew up like me and married the only guy they ever really knew, just because there weren’t many options around. It’s not uncommon for kids raised in the church to not date alot, and to save themselves for marriage. They end up with whoever was there for them to end up with. This was not the case for me. I know in my heart that there is or was no other man on the Earth I could have possibly been meant for. Sure, I could have ended up with someone else. But God saw fit for some reason to bring me this guy when I was so young, who would know me as I grew up, who would love me truly as a friend with no ulterior motives, and who would completely get my life and the oddness of it. We couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds, but we are the perfect match.
This is the good part of the story. Stay tuned for our dating years, and you’ll understand what a miracle it is that we actually survived as a couple until our wedding day. I will leave you for now with this: If you are single and you feel like you will never find “your person,” I encourage you to find joy in the waiting. Become friends, and don’t rush that process. Everyone says to marry your best friend, but it’s so true. Trust whatever process God has for you, because by the end of it, you will be exactly who you’re supposed to be for the person you’re supposed to be with. The things we endured once we were officially a couple built us into such strong people, separately and together, and prepared us for anything life could throw at us with relative ease. That includes starting our lives completely over in 2011 when we eventually left this place together with our children. As ugly as our dating years were, I can look back now and see God’s hand on us. He knew us, He knew our hearts, and He has always worked everything out for our good. Stay tuned!
Until next time…. 🙂
Wow!