Marriage Mondays - Our journey to matrimony -part 1

Tomorrow is our 6th wedding anniversary. In honor of that wonderful day I have decided to dedicate the last Monday of every month to a post about marriage.

To start I want to share our journey to becoming husband and wife. We are far from a typical love story, but I think we have an amazing journey that has helped us form a solid and lasting marriage.

How we met:

It was just before my final semester at Bible College. I worked on site and over the summer break we were hosting a youth camp for the fellowship of Pastor's who also ran the college. One of the Pastor's had arranged with two of his supporting Churches to have teams of people come and help us with setting up for camp and then for taking everything back down again after camp. While these teams of volunteers were staying at the college to help us I would be cooking for them.

I cannot count the number of times I had heard the "maybe you'll meet your husband" comments. It started when I made the decision to go to Bible College as a mature student. (I was 30 a few weeks before I started.) We were a tiny facility that definitely didn't have many opportunities for meeting potential future spouses, which I knew when I picked that college. I wasn't going to Bible College to find a husband. I was going to Bible College to study God's Word. There were times when I wanted to scream at the "meet your husband" comments. Now don't get me wrong I had always had the desire to be a wife and a mother. And I wanted to get married if that was the Lord's will for my life. But I also didn't want to marry just any man. So it wasn't really a surprise when the comments started about "meeting your future husband" through one of the two groups of volunteers. Both groups were coming from America. And I had no desire to marry an American. Truth be told marrying an American man was right at the bottom of my list.

The South Florida Church Group with a few of us locals

 Then the first group of volunteers arrived. They came from a Church in South Florida. The group was about half younger adults, who were going out the two local Churches to help run Holiday Bible Clubs for children for the week. The other half of the group were older adults who had come to help us build bunk beds and complete some renovation work to get us ready to host the youth camp. Rob was part of the construction group. They arrived Saturday evening. By Sunday afternoon I was being told by numerous people that Rob was single and I should get to know him. I avoided him instead.

On Monday morning I was up and down in the kitchen by 5am to get the ovens warmed up and the coffee started before I could begin preparing breakfast. After switching on the ovens I headed to the dining room to start making coffee. It was my routine to make the coffee and then sit down with a mug of it and read my Bible while it was still quiet and nobody else was awake. Only when I got to the dining room the coffee was ready and waiting for me. So I poured myself a mug and sat at one of the tables to read my Bible. About ten minutes later Rob walked in, poured a mug of coffee for himself, then came over and introduced himself before sitting down. We chatted for about fifteen minutes before I had to get back to the kitchen to get started on breakfast.

After breakfast he helped with some of the clean up. Then when I sat out some fresh baked chocolate chip cookies with fresh coffee for the construction crew to have a break in the middle of the morning Rob came over and chatted with me again. At lunch he came and sat beside me and the conversation continued where it had finished mid morning. After that whenever he had free time he would find me and chat more. We got on well. He was a genuinely nice guy. More importantly he didn't seem to be disapproving or intimidated of my very strong opinions. He seemed glad of having someone to talk to about more than just trivialities. But neither of us were thinking of anything happening beyond that week.

Rob & I still chatting on the final day, completely unaware this picture was being taken.

We didn't even decide to keep in touch until about five minutes before he left for the airport.