Before Forever
By:Byron Weathersbee
Published on 2008-08 by
It was impulsive of me, I know, to go out on a limb and write what I did in that postcard after only two dates with Carla. At the time, however, something inside told me that she was the one. But could I trust that little voice inside? If anything, I should have distrusted it, for I d only recently broken up with my high school sweetheart. So what did that little voice and I really know? // Can we trust that voice inside that tells us he or she is the one? // Carla far exceeded anyone I had imagined would come my way. Spring term had just ended for us at the university we attended when she left to work at a camp for the summer. I can have a pretty one-track mind and so using a blank postcard that a friend of mine had brought back from a recent trip of his to Hawaii, I jotted a note to Carla along with the cryptic note |82884WWBTAOWD| tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner. It looked like a postal code, and no one but me knew that it stood for |We will be there after our wedding day: 8/28/84.| Inside I was sure I knew what I wanted, but outside there wasn t a chance I would let anyone know. As much as I was drawn to a life together with Carla, I didn t yet want her to know it! That was pretty bold of me (or maybe psycho), considering it was three years prior to my projected Hawaiian honeymoon.1 But I was so smitten by Carla I could have penned the note with my own testosterone. Rereading that postcard today you can tell that we didn t know each other all that well, but every encounter I d had with Carla (all two of them!) left me more captivated by this woman. One of those meetings was at |Rock n Roll,| one of those crazy guy-girl college functions at a skating rink, where the small group Carla was leading and the group of guys that grabbed me decided to gather. Truth be told, I had looked forward to skating in circles about as much as being chained in front of the home decorating channel. But like most hot-blooded college males, at the time I was willing to make an exception if the prospect of picking up a great woman was involved. As a joke, the DJ played one of those junior high |couples only| songs. It was at that point I realized Carla was the one. Not really the one to marry just the one to ask to skate. My heart was racing as I built up courage to ask Carla. As trite and cheesy as that may sound, my hands sweat more than an evangelist at a summer tent revival when I m nervous. So for me to ask Carla whom I didn t really know to skate with me while holding my sweat-slippery hands took some big-time courage. (Don t laugh. All of us have personal insecurities held over from 7th grade.) I didn t want to gross her out, but I also didn t want to let the opportunity slip by, because in the vernacular of the early 1980 s Carla was what my friends and I called a |godly fox.| What a stupid phrase. At the time, however, that saying was |off the hook.| Carla had me |crazier than a mug,| another phrase with the shelf life of about a month. And though the way we say it changes more often than a university freshman changes majors, the experience down through the centuries remains the same: I soon fully believed Carla was the one. She was the most beautiful, most Christ-centered, most amazing woman I had ever met. Put bluntly, I was deeply infatuated with her. Married people often tell singles in that twitter-pated state of mind I was in that spring, |You ll know whether she s the one.| |But how?| you naturally ask when you begin getting serious. |Oh, you ll just know.| |But how?!| you may think. Often, no one will give you a better answer than |You just know that you know,| another stupid phrase that needs to go out with 1980 s parachute pants. Yet in spite of all I didn t know then, and as presumptuous as my hidden Hawaiian love note was, Carla entered my life somehow as an answer to a question my heart had been asking for years. Something clicked in me when I met her, and I knew that if she was not the girl I would marry, then my future wife would probably be someone an awful lot like her. That much I already knew. If only |knowing that you know| were easier. But that s precisely the point, we think. Knowing whether she or he is the one isn t easy for a reason. It s difficult because the journey God is leading you on is one that will search you to the core. |Knowing that you know| isn t as simple as browsing the Internet to match your online personality profile with some pre-selected mate. Instead it s a journey that will challenge your faith, deepen your trust, and refine who you are in the process. You see, this journey isn t only about seeking a yes or no answer to marriage. It s about something much larger, where God s Spirit mysteriously touches our lives and we find God wooing us through our search to |know that we know| into a relationship with Him more beautiful than the very thing you re seeking by picking up this book. That journey is what this book is all about.|
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