I Fell In Love Backwards. Love Story Part 1

I hesitate to tell my own "love story" because it's not your usual sort of story filled with starry eyes and thumping hearts.  It would never make the big screen, that's for sure.  But it's beautiful in it's own way. 

Usually, when people ask how Creighton and I met and married, I give a really abbreviated version of the story, and it varies from person to person depending on what I think they can handle hearing.  It's a very long story.  In fact, I don't think there is a living soul who knows it in it's entirety, beyond the two of us.  Maybe that's how it is for everyone.  Maybe that's how it should be.

But, I've been thinking about writing it out from my current perspective for awhile now, because who doesn't enjoy a good love story?  Even if it is a little backward.I have more little miracles waiting in the wings for this blog, but I could easily say that the fact that I ended up marrying Creighton was perhaps the greatest miracle of them all. I'm sure our families would agree with that.

So let me tell you about it... 

I think I'll start by answering your question, Sally:  No, I did not recognize the miracle of being in the right place at the right time to meet Creighton back then.  No No No.  I definitely thought there was something in the works when things came together so suddenly for me to go to Washington, D.C., but I took it at face value until years later.  Really, the timing couldn't have been more perfect. 

But I have to back up and tell you another story before I move on, or none of it will make any sense.  The five years from meeting to marriage, the 10 or 12 breakups....it all gets very awkward  in the storytelling unless you have a little background first.  This one is a sad story, so get ready...

Love Story before The Love Story

Once upon a time, several years before I met the boy named Creighton, I met a different boy.  And I fell in love. Truly. And deeply. But falling in love with him was like boarding a speeding locomotive, and for a girl who'd never ridden the love train before, it was terrifying. I was so young.  The future was coming at me so fast.  And in my attempts to slow down that train and catch my mind up with my heart- to be sure of myself and of him- I hurt this boy.  Without ever intending to.  And in his pain, and surely out of self-preservation and self-respect, he chose to break my heart before I could break his.

And he succeeded.

That is the short of it.

C.S. Lewis once wrote:

To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  (C. S. Lewis- The Business of Heaven)

I was devastated. The wind had been knocked out of my soul. My heart was dark, motionless and airless, to be sure. And in my own act of self-preservation, it became impenetrable. My mind took complete control.  Other boys came... and went- one after another after another. And I could feel nothing. I was damned.



I have since come to see beauty in that tragedy.  While the pain of it deafened me for a very long time, it ultimately opened my heart up to more love than I ever thought was possible.  I sometimes think I would like to protect my children from heartbreak and spare them the kind of grief I have known, but would I be denying them an opportunity for the kind of love and happiness I know too?  I wonder if every one of our hearts must be broken in some way or another in order to ultimately find true fulfillment in life or in heaven.

We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.  If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.  (C.S. Lewis)

That is the background.  That is the state I was in when God worked his magic and whisked me away to D.C. so I could meet that boy with the unusual name. 

Are you sure you still want to hear more?