My Journey

I started college with a boyfriend who went to a college 6 hours away. High School sweethearts. We could make it work...right? Christmas 1994 and I found I couldn't reconcile our belief systems and that it just wasn't working. We agreed to be friends. I'm not sure exactly where he is 26 years later, but I still consider him a friend. I went back to school after winter break, with the idea to casually date. I had very few rules for what I was looking for, but one was that I didn't want to date and then marry a future preacher, because I didn't want preacher's kids. You can laugh. I laugh looking back on it. I went to a small (less than 500 people) Christian college. My odds were not great. Enter Christopher, who my roommate was crushing on hard. Bible major, cute, kind of opinionated and stubborn. I fell hard. So hard that I believed and he believed that he wasn't going to be a preacher. He wanted to teach at the University level. Cool. Little did we realize that Bible professors supplement their income preaching, and life happens.

We decide that we want to leave this small college and go to a bigger Christian University, but it's out of either of our price range and we'd qualify for limited financial aid based on our parents' incomes. His dad actually came up with the solution. We could get married that August and go to this university 12 hours away and be financially independent. We were going to get married anyway, so it was just a move up in the timeline. So that's what we did. We got married on Saturday and registered for classes on Tuesday. I was 19 and he was 21. We were loving married life and doing school and things were great. In February, just after my 21st birthday, we got a slight change in our trajectory. I was expecting. It wasn't planned, we weren't trying, but it's a potential outcome of being married. We were thrilled. Until I started to be super sick, throwing up non-stop, not even being able to hold down water sick. I spent 10 weeks in that situation, sleeping and puking, until my potassium bottomed out and I was on the verge of a heart attack. Christopher sat by my side, except when he had to go home or to school. I had managed to land myself in the hospital during finals week. Life was so upside down that he showed up for the wrong class's exam one day. Thankfully, his professor was so kind and happened to have the exam he had studied for on him and let him swap them. That's one of the cool things about going to a 1500 student Christian university. The professors and staff know you, and care about you. We became close friends with another couple that week because the wife, a nurse, showed up to sit in my room at the hospital while Christopher was off doing what he needed to do. She invited him to dinner, which was great since it had been 11 weeks since his wife had cooked a homecooked meal. He instantly hit it off with her husband and we found out that he was in the master's program for Bible. He was a pharmacist and had converted from Catholicism. If we had had god-parents in our belief system at that time, they would have been it. As it was, they were known as Aunt and Uncle to our kids. They got our northerner references since they had hailed from Canada and Minnesota.

The first kid did not derail my studies. He was born in October and I was back to school part time in January. Christopher would do classes on Monday-Wednesday-Friday and I had Tuesday-Thursday. Christopher graduated that May and started graduate classes that fall. The following January would bring another surprise, another baby was on her way. I got sick even earlier. I dropped my classes. Christopher looked at our situation and decided that he needed to become full-time employed since we were going to be a family of 4. This led to a 9 month journey of interviews, packing up, sending our stuff home to Michigan, and giving up. But, the reason that we sent our stuff, instead of taking our stuff is because God has a tremendous sense of humor. We had to give up and be ready to move on before he brought us to where he wanted us, but that's an experience for another chapter.