Completing Him Challenge (June 14 – a little late)

I am starting late with this challenge.  Posts will be put up on Mondays.  They started June 7.

 

At this link, you an find the topics for each week.  And if you watch this short video, you can find out what the challenge is all about:

 

Now, on to the meat of this post!

Instructions from Women Living Well:

June 14 – Post Pictures from your dating days (or tell us all about it!). Think about one thing you used to do or have as a couple that you have lost in the shuffle of life. How can you regain it?

This is Jason and I at the Bible camp in Saskatchewan that he worked at the summer that we met.  My dad was the director there and Jason did everything from prep work, to counselling to activities coordinator.  I was doing a pastoral internship at my parents’ church that summer.  We met the first week of June at an activity I had planned at the church.  We did not have good first impressions of each other.  I thought he was a snob.  He thought I was annoying.

The annual family camp was the last weekend of June, I believe.  I did not want to go.  Jason had already put out “a fleece” that if I was not the one that I would not be at family camp.  We had a few interactions through the month of June with the church’s youth group / college and career activities.  The pastor I was interning under and I had a very strong relationship and I had shared (or he’d picked up on) the feelings and sparks that were flying whether we wanted them to or not.  The pastor made it a requirement for me to attend the family camp with him; my own family was going to be there.  So I went.  I had a great time and got to know Jason a little more with some late night talks.  I left the camp at the end of the weekend in tears with NO IDEA WHY!  It was the strangest thing.  I guess that’s when our relationship started, as Jason says that he knew then that I was the one he was going to marry.

Officially, we did not start dating until late July when I confronted him with what his intentions were.  I don’t know why.  I would have been okay with a “summer fling” but if this was going to be a serious, long term thing, I wanted to know that too.  He said he wanted to make it something serious.

The summer was WAY TOO SHORT and soon my internship was completed and college was starting again, in another province.  He chose not to return to his home farm in Ontario but found a place to live and employment in the community where my parents live.  We continued a long distance relationship with lots of letters (on my part) and lots of LONG phone calls.  We were very thankful for unlimited long distance calling!

He came to visit me at the college in November.  After a four day visit, he went home and back to work.  Within that first week of his departure we had decided that when I was home for Christmas break that we would be married.  We planned to elope, almost – we wanted both sets of parents there in the pastor’s office.  That’s all we wanted.  However my parents wanted to have a more traditional wedding for their only daughter.  So we made some arrangements – my mom and dad planned and paid for the wedding.  I was in final exams and Jason was working lots.  Between studying and writing exams I found us a place to live so I could finish my last semester of college.  I returned to school after Christmas as a married student.

 

As a dating couple we had and made lots of time to just sit and visit.  We talked and talked and talked.  We took time to watch movies together.  We just wanted to be in each others’ company.  I don’t think that the desire to be in one another’s company has changed, but the taking the time to do so has changed.  We don’t take the time to talk to each other except about the necessary and important things.  With a busy family of 5 (almost 6) children we just haven’t taken the time.  Jason’s current job is such that when it’s busy it’s really really busy.  When it’s not busy, it’s really really slow.  We are adjusting to many things in our lives almost daily.  We need to start taking the time to visit with one another again.  We’ve talked about weekly date nights, but it never seems to work out.  Again it is often his job that interferes.  He’s on call 24/7 as a fire fighter for two different locations. 

When we do get time to be alone together there are a couple of issues that keep us from talking.  Electronics – TV, computer, telephone, etc. and we just enjoy the silence.  Our life is so busy that  when we are driving somewhere without the children, we just don’t talk; we are thinking without being interrupted a gazillion times but we just don’t talk.  I think that having a regularly scheduled time to be together without the children is going to be key to getting back that time we used to take to get to know each other better.

 

Striving to learn and live God's purposes,