If You Want the Short Version, Don't Keep Reading!
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Our story starts because somebody's kid wanted to name a new baby Lauren.
Strange, but true. Okay, there's a lot more to it than that, but essentially...that's how it starts. When Ben was growing up, he had a best friend named Paul. Paul lived a few doors down from a girl about their age named Emily. He and Emily were buddies when they were little and continued to be in high school, which is how Ben and Emily ended up being friends. |
Confused yet? Don't worry, this gets a lot more complicated.
Now, I have friends with lots of kids. One of those friends got so used to giving advice to younger moms (with fewer kids) that she began a whole website devoted to sharing her family's philosophy on child-rearing with other people who were curious how a mom with ten kids could make it all work. She seemed to be having so much fun with it that I finally snuck quietly into the website (okay, I did get permission from Mom and Mrs. Krueger approved my application...and I was 21 years old, so I wasn't too terribly young at the time) and would "listen" to the conversations going on over the bulletin board. It was fascinating stuff. After a year or two, a young mom named Emily joined the board. She started asking for some advice on some things with her oldest son, who was only three or so at the time. He was being very stubborn and one of the things he was stubborn about was the name of the new baby they were expecting. The baby's name was going to be Rebecca: but he was convinced for some obscure reason that it should be Lauren.
My attention was caught. We began exchanging private messages and very, very long philosophical emails. This was probably Emily's first indication that Ben and I might get along. And yes, that is an inside joke to anyone who has ever had occasion to email either one of us.
A few years (and two babies for Emily) later, she gave me a call one Thursday afternoon in September. I was in the middle of making peach jam. Emily doesn't call on the phone too much since I get the feeling neither one of us is a good phone-chatter. Pretty much the first thing she said to me was, "I feel stupid."
Yeah, it's an abrupt way to start a conversation; but you have to admit, it gets the attention. So of course, I asked the obvious.
"Because I'm not a match-maker," she said. This is true. Lots of people have suggested their friends to me over the years, but that's not one of Emily's characteristics.
"Okay," I said. "I agree. Why would that make you feel stupid?"
"Because I have this friend," she said. "And every time I see him I think of you and every time I see you I think of him. You remind me of each other. But you're from such different backgrounds I just keep thinking you're both going to think I'm crazy."
"I don't think you're crazy," I said. "I think I'm very touched that you thought of me."
"Well, I saw him the other night and I told him all about you," she said. "He says he's emailed a few people but it's never really gone beyond that, but he'd be willing to exchange emails if you were."
"Sure," I said. Because what could it hurt? I remember thinking, 'that's so strange. But that does seem to be how God does things.'
I'm not by nature a prophetic person; but then, neither is Emily. Which goes to show what God really does do sometimes.
So Emily sent Ben my email and I kept an eye on the inbox...
And waited.
Of course, by this time - September of 2010 - I was pretty used to waiting. When I was little, I figured I'd meet someone at 18 and get married at 21 like Mom and Dad did; or I'd marry someone I'd grown up with and still get married young. That just is proof of how silly it is to try to plan such things on your own timetable. But the end result was that 27 or 28 had seemed way, way, way too old to be getting married when I was a kid; and when I WAS 27, it still seemed pretty far along. When I was reaching my 28th birthday, it had become a long wait with no particular end in sight. It wasn't like I'd dated a lot and kept turning people down, either. There was just...no one. When the weeks went by and Ben didn't email, I more or less said, "Ah well. My life is good and it's not any less good because Ben didn't really want to write to me."
Then on October 20th, Ben sent me an email. It was only about a paragraph long and I sent a short email back because I didn't want to send a novel like usual.
Ha. As it turns out, that's pretty funny. Apparently, both of us excel in the sport of writing very long emails. The definition of a novel is apparently a book that runs about 60,000 to 90,000 words long, depending on the publisher. Some of the super long Sci-Fi books out there these days come in around 125,000 words. The official Word document containing our emails claims we wrote 137,783 words, but I figure we might have to allow a 37,000-word shrinkage factor due to the fact we answered each others' questions by cutting and pasting excerpts before answering.
By my calculations, therefore, it took us about five months to write a major novel. And it is a major novel. It very thoroughly covers who we are and what we believe in, starting with the most important things and only gradually filtering down into less important ones. We wrote about so many topics we had to start organizing the emails so we could keep track of the multiple threads we were following at the same time. Neither one of us had anything to lose by being blunt, so we were. Email is good for this. You can say, "Hey, these are the things I believe" right up front and when you find out that you have compatible philosophies of life, things start out on a much better foundation than if you started at the surface and tried to work inward. Ben's first email said, "I'd like to talk about God and what we both believe first, because all the other things are just fascinating details."
That one sentence alone what really first clued me in that Ben is a very special man. He thinks original thoughts and he gets excited about what is true and real and good, often things that other people overlook completely or just shrug and think are silly or impossible. A long time ago, I wrote down some things I wanted to see in a man I hoped to marry, and one of them was this: "Notice the important things other people overlook and barely notice the things a lot of people think are important that aren't." That's definitely Ben. His strongest characteristic - what makes him most valuable - is that he loves and is drawn to what is true and right and he's excited when he finds some new truth he didn't understand before. That's how he came to believe in God.
At the end of December, Emily got tired of asking if we'd actually met in person yet and arranged for us to both come over to her house to visit. She didn't spring this on us as a surprise, thankfully. I brought my sister Anna with me and we got there before Ben. When I'm nervous, I tend to be early. When Ben's nervous, he tends to be late. This isn't because he forgets the time, but because he tends to remember right when he's getting ready to leave that there's something he wants to make sure to get done relating to where he's supposed to be. In this case, he wanted to stop and get flowers.
For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm not the kind of person who would put an ad in the paper saying I'm fond of walks on the beach and can't live without getting roses once a week. For one thing, I tend to grow the roses and feel sad when they die in vases. I'm pretty sure Ben had figured that out by that point, but he wanted to bring flowers anyway, so he stopped at Kroger and got roses for me. When he walked in the door, though, he sort of hid them behind the Christmas tree so I didn't realize they were for me. He says that he looked at me and said, "Huh...so that's what the woman I'm going to marry looks like."
I didn't have that kind of premonition. All I thought was, "He looks so much younger than I expected."
And he didn't say much, either. He smiled a lot, but most of the evening everybody chatted and Ben drank a lot of tea and smiled and only added a few comments. I don't remember much of what we talked about other than discussing Emily and Barry's search for a new church and how it was a dangerous thing to watch the TV show "24" because it was hard to turn it off and walk away.
But when we were leaving - at 1:00 AM - he finally gave me the flowers. "It's a pretty cheesy thing to do," he said. "But I did get these for you."
I thought they were beautiful, but I was too startled to say so properly, I think. Ben didn't seem to mind, though. He gave me a hug good-bye.
Now, Ben likes to hug people. I don't tend to spontaneously hug anyone outside my family too often unless it's a special circumstance like a wedding. I had no idea he was going to hug me like that and he says now that I stiffened up like I was shocked, so he didn't know if I was offended or not. I wasn't. Just surprised. I did about the same thing months later when he first reached over and held my hand - I said, "What?" like he was trying to get my attention or something. Ben finds this amusing. I tend to find it mildly embarrassing.
It took another three weeks before he came over to our house to visit. I was wondering about the delay when I finally figured out that Ben knew we came from somewhat different backgrounds and he wasn't sure if I would be okay with anything he was familiar with when it came to things like dating or even just basic interaction (such as hugging, for example). So in one of our phone conversations - which turned out to be as ridiculously long as our emails - I told him that I didn't have any list of rules he needed to follow and that if he felt something was good and right to do, he should do it. Not only that, but Dad said he should come over for dinner. So he did. And he asked me to come with him to visit his grandma the next Tuesday like he usually did.
One of the things I always believed would be important about a man I would want to marry was that instead of getting to know each other by doing abnormal "fun" stuff (going to movies, etc.), he would want to do normal things. Rake leaves, do grocery shopping, spend time with family, work on daily projects. Real life things. I hadn't told Ben that at the time, but it turns out Ben is pretty much the same way. So the first time I ever went on anything like a date, it was to fit in with Ben's normal routine: have lunch with Grandma Lila on Tuesday. We've pretty much been doing that ever since.
After that we began gradually spending more and more time together. I went with my grandparents to Florida in February and realized I missed seeing Ben, though we wrote perhaps some of our most important emails that week when he was snowed in with his family by a big storm in Michigan and I had lots of time to spare sitting on a dock in Florida. It was while I was in Florida that he first ended an email by "love, Benjamin", which I didn't know at the time was as significant as it was. Ben apparently never signs things that way while I always do, so I sort of missed that at first until he did it a couple of times and I noticed he hadn't before.
One of the things we spent time discussing was the concept that people who are married are meant to be like one person. The easiest way to be like one person is to consistently see and experience the same things at the same time. I began going more and more places with Ben because my goal was to stay with him. I figured the more I saw him in all the little normal everyday situations everybody's in all the time, the more I would know who he really was and the more he would really know who I was. I think people began realizing we were both serious about this when I started going to work with him in May. It was about the same time - Easter Sunday, which was in May this year - that I looked at Ben and said, "I love this man. I could spend the rest of my life with him and it would be a wonderful life."
But I didn't say anything about it and neither did Ben because it didn't seem like the right time yet.
We both knew we'd started emailing with the understanding that neither of us was interested in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship; however, just about the time we really began seeing each other a lot (in April), my younger sister Leah got engaged to her now-husband Benjamin and Ben made a few comments that led me to believe he didn't want to ask me to marry him until Leah and Benjamin's wedding was done and no longer taking so much time and energy from our family. So in June I was looking at the calender and thinking, "If he doesn't ask me until September, it's going to be at least January before we can get married."
Yes, I really was thinking that way. But no, I hadn't named our first three children yet.
Then we had a really big thunderstorm on the evening of June 21st. Ben and I both really like thunderstorms and this was one a really spectacular one. We were sitting on the Turner's back porch watching the wind and the lightning when Ben put his arm around me and rested his head against mine and said, "I love you, Lauren."
Ben still laughs because my response was, "What did you say?" and then when he repeated himself I said, "Really?!"
Hey, you can imagine something a long time and still be surprised when it finally appears. Just picture being a kid waiting for your birthday and thinking it's such a looooooong way away...and then one morning, it really is your birthday. If you remember that feeling, that's how I felt. Because for the longest time I had put thought into what kind of man I would like to marry - not how tall he'd be or what he'd look like, but who he was. And Ben is that man; and even better than simply being that kind of man, he was interested in me. More than interested: he said, "I love you." He waited a long time to say it because to say it meant something. That is not a casual thing to Ben, telling someone that he loves them. Any more casual than it is for me to hug someone.
Of course, because I knew Ben had waited because saying "I love you" means something, I sort of expected Ben to say, "Will you marry me?" but he didn't. As it turns out, he didn't because he hadn't gotten a ring and wasn't even really sure where to start with getting one; and he says he thought it was like some sort of rule that you never break to ask a girl to marry you without having a ring. I didn't know what the holdup was, but I came to the conclusion that if I were a man thinking about marrying a girl, it'd give me a lot of confidence if the girl let him know she wasn't going to turn him down when he asked her. So I did my best without actually saying, "If you ask me to marry you, I really will say yes".
On the 29th of June, we had a very, very busy day. We cleaned up the landscaping on four houses my family owns and then went to the Turner's house in the evening to work on assembling some fiberglass parts to a big project we were helping Dad Turner with. By 9:00 when we got done, we were both so tired that we parked ourselves on the glider on the back porch and didn't move for the next hour and a half, which is about the time everyone in the house went to bed. "I should really take you home," Ben said. But neither one of us was too ready to move, so we didn't. Then after a little, Ben shifted around so he was sort of sitting sideways on the glider facing me and said, "I really don't want to take you home. I want to grow old with you. I want to have a house with you. I want to have lots of babies with you. But in order to do these things, we really have to get married."
The funny thing is, he said it in such a straight-forward tone I wasn't sure if he was asking me or opening a discussion about the topic. "Are you asking me?" I said. These are the kinds of things you can say to a man who loves truthfulness.
"Yes," Ben said. "Will you marry me?"
And I said, "Of course I will. Absolutely!"
No fancy dinner, no nervousness, no staying awake all night planning, and no ring. Turns out proposals can be a lot easier than the movies make them out to be. The best part about deciding to get married was that when we reached a decision, we reached a decision and there didn't have to be any fuss about it. It was just time.
And that's how I expect marriage will remain for us. A lot of people like to say a lot of things in life are "really hard" and make a big dramatic deal about the process of any of them happening. Finding someone to marry and getting married is exciting, no doubt about that; but there's also a normalcy to it that I didn't know to expect. It's as natural to be marrying Ben as it is to eat dinner when I'm hungry, and the whole process of getting there turns out to be a lot like that too. Things do not always have to seem like a Big Deal to be important or to be special. "Special" happens everyday. It doesn't need set times or places to occur.
That's the way God made things, probably one of the reasons even his son was born on such a normal day no one really remembers for sure when it was and ended up prosaically wrapped like any other newborn and stuck in a manger to sleep. Not to be irreverent, but in a huge way he's like the man who "never made a great play" in baseball because he always just managed to be exactly where the ball was going. In God's plans, everything is arranged so neatly that you can miss it going by because it seems completely expected and natural at the time. It's only when you look back that you say, "Wow. How could that EVER have happened that way?" How could Ben and I have lived our whole lives practically in the same places at all the same times and yet meet because I met a friend of his through a friend of mine on the Internet? I've heard of people meeting by Internet before, but this is a strange combination of the normal way people used to meet - through friends - and the new way a lot of people meet - by deliberately going on the web looking to meet someone. How is it that the peculiar philosophy I happen to have could so neatly mesh with someone else who shared almost none of the same influences I'd grown up with? How could someone who never really had the impulse to match-make before spend a year trying to ignore the impulse to introduce Ben and I before she did? Only God does things like that. For that matter, why is it that Emily's son Matthew would insist on naming a baby Lauren, which is how she caught my eye and we came to meet in the first place? You can't write a book with a plotline that has those kinds of coincidences because people would say, "Oh, that's not realistic."
But it's true and the story's real; and now you probably know way more than you ever wanted to know about the whole thing!
Now, I have friends with lots of kids. One of those friends got so used to giving advice to younger moms (with fewer kids) that she began a whole website devoted to sharing her family's philosophy on child-rearing with other people who were curious how a mom with ten kids could make it all work. She seemed to be having so much fun with it that I finally snuck quietly into the website (okay, I did get permission from Mom and Mrs. Krueger approved my application...and I was 21 years old, so I wasn't too terribly young at the time) and would "listen" to the conversations going on over the bulletin board. It was fascinating stuff. After a year or two, a young mom named Emily joined the board. She started asking for some advice on some things with her oldest son, who was only three or so at the time. He was being very stubborn and one of the things he was stubborn about was the name of the new baby they were expecting. The baby's name was going to be Rebecca: but he was convinced for some obscure reason that it should be Lauren.
My attention was caught. We began exchanging private messages and very, very long philosophical emails. This was probably Emily's first indication that Ben and I might get along. And yes, that is an inside joke to anyone who has ever had occasion to email either one of us.
A few years (and two babies for Emily) later, she gave me a call one Thursday afternoon in September. I was in the middle of making peach jam. Emily doesn't call on the phone too much since I get the feeling neither one of us is a good phone-chatter. Pretty much the first thing she said to me was, "I feel stupid."
Yeah, it's an abrupt way to start a conversation; but you have to admit, it gets the attention. So of course, I asked the obvious.
"Because I'm not a match-maker," she said. This is true. Lots of people have suggested their friends to me over the years, but that's not one of Emily's characteristics.
"Okay," I said. "I agree. Why would that make you feel stupid?"
"Because I have this friend," she said. "And every time I see him I think of you and every time I see you I think of him. You remind me of each other. But you're from such different backgrounds I just keep thinking you're both going to think I'm crazy."
"I don't think you're crazy," I said. "I think I'm very touched that you thought of me."
"Well, I saw him the other night and I told him all about you," she said. "He says he's emailed a few people but it's never really gone beyond that, but he'd be willing to exchange emails if you were."
"Sure," I said. Because what could it hurt? I remember thinking, 'that's so strange. But that does seem to be how God does things.'
I'm not by nature a prophetic person; but then, neither is Emily. Which goes to show what God really does do sometimes.
So Emily sent Ben my email and I kept an eye on the inbox...
And waited.
Of course, by this time - September of 2010 - I was pretty used to waiting. When I was little, I figured I'd meet someone at 18 and get married at 21 like Mom and Dad did; or I'd marry someone I'd grown up with and still get married young. That just is proof of how silly it is to try to plan such things on your own timetable. But the end result was that 27 or 28 had seemed way, way, way too old to be getting married when I was a kid; and when I WAS 27, it still seemed pretty far along. When I was reaching my 28th birthday, it had become a long wait with no particular end in sight. It wasn't like I'd dated a lot and kept turning people down, either. There was just...no one. When the weeks went by and Ben didn't email, I more or less said, "Ah well. My life is good and it's not any less good because Ben didn't really want to write to me."
Then on October 20th, Ben sent me an email. It was only about a paragraph long and I sent a short email back because I didn't want to send a novel like usual.
Ha. As it turns out, that's pretty funny. Apparently, both of us excel in the sport of writing very long emails. The definition of a novel is apparently a book that runs about 60,000 to 90,000 words long, depending on the publisher. Some of the super long Sci-Fi books out there these days come in around 125,000 words. The official Word document containing our emails claims we wrote 137,783 words, but I figure we might have to allow a 37,000-word shrinkage factor due to the fact we answered each others' questions by cutting and pasting excerpts before answering.
By my calculations, therefore, it took us about five months to write a major novel. And it is a major novel. It very thoroughly covers who we are and what we believe in, starting with the most important things and only gradually filtering down into less important ones. We wrote about so many topics we had to start organizing the emails so we could keep track of the multiple threads we were following at the same time. Neither one of us had anything to lose by being blunt, so we were. Email is good for this. You can say, "Hey, these are the things I believe" right up front and when you find out that you have compatible philosophies of life, things start out on a much better foundation than if you started at the surface and tried to work inward. Ben's first email said, "I'd like to talk about God and what we both believe first, because all the other things are just fascinating details."
That one sentence alone what really first clued me in that Ben is a very special man. He thinks original thoughts and he gets excited about what is true and real and good, often things that other people overlook completely or just shrug and think are silly or impossible. A long time ago, I wrote down some things I wanted to see in a man I hoped to marry, and one of them was this: "Notice the important things other people overlook and barely notice the things a lot of people think are important that aren't." That's definitely Ben. His strongest characteristic - what makes him most valuable - is that he loves and is drawn to what is true and right and he's excited when he finds some new truth he didn't understand before. That's how he came to believe in God.
At the end of December, Emily got tired of asking if we'd actually met in person yet and arranged for us to both come over to her house to visit. She didn't spring this on us as a surprise, thankfully. I brought my sister Anna with me and we got there before Ben. When I'm nervous, I tend to be early. When Ben's nervous, he tends to be late. This isn't because he forgets the time, but because he tends to remember right when he's getting ready to leave that there's something he wants to make sure to get done relating to where he's supposed to be. In this case, he wanted to stop and get flowers.
For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm not the kind of person who would put an ad in the paper saying I'm fond of walks on the beach and can't live without getting roses once a week. For one thing, I tend to grow the roses and feel sad when they die in vases. I'm pretty sure Ben had figured that out by that point, but he wanted to bring flowers anyway, so he stopped at Kroger and got roses for me. When he walked in the door, though, he sort of hid them behind the Christmas tree so I didn't realize they were for me. He says that he looked at me and said, "Huh...so that's what the woman I'm going to marry looks like."
I didn't have that kind of premonition. All I thought was, "He looks so much younger than I expected."
And he didn't say much, either. He smiled a lot, but most of the evening everybody chatted and Ben drank a lot of tea and smiled and only added a few comments. I don't remember much of what we talked about other than discussing Emily and Barry's search for a new church and how it was a dangerous thing to watch the TV show "24" because it was hard to turn it off and walk away.
But when we were leaving - at 1:00 AM - he finally gave me the flowers. "It's a pretty cheesy thing to do," he said. "But I did get these for you."
I thought they were beautiful, but I was too startled to say so properly, I think. Ben didn't seem to mind, though. He gave me a hug good-bye.
Now, Ben likes to hug people. I don't tend to spontaneously hug anyone outside my family too often unless it's a special circumstance like a wedding. I had no idea he was going to hug me like that and he says now that I stiffened up like I was shocked, so he didn't know if I was offended or not. I wasn't. Just surprised. I did about the same thing months later when he first reached over and held my hand - I said, "What?" like he was trying to get my attention or something. Ben finds this amusing. I tend to find it mildly embarrassing.
It took another three weeks before he came over to our house to visit. I was wondering about the delay when I finally figured out that Ben knew we came from somewhat different backgrounds and he wasn't sure if I would be okay with anything he was familiar with when it came to things like dating or even just basic interaction (such as hugging, for example). So in one of our phone conversations - which turned out to be as ridiculously long as our emails - I told him that I didn't have any list of rules he needed to follow and that if he felt something was good and right to do, he should do it. Not only that, but Dad said he should come over for dinner. So he did. And he asked me to come with him to visit his grandma the next Tuesday like he usually did.
One of the things I always believed would be important about a man I would want to marry was that instead of getting to know each other by doing abnormal "fun" stuff (going to movies, etc.), he would want to do normal things. Rake leaves, do grocery shopping, spend time with family, work on daily projects. Real life things. I hadn't told Ben that at the time, but it turns out Ben is pretty much the same way. So the first time I ever went on anything like a date, it was to fit in with Ben's normal routine: have lunch with Grandma Lila on Tuesday. We've pretty much been doing that ever since.
After that we began gradually spending more and more time together. I went with my grandparents to Florida in February and realized I missed seeing Ben, though we wrote perhaps some of our most important emails that week when he was snowed in with his family by a big storm in Michigan and I had lots of time to spare sitting on a dock in Florida. It was while I was in Florida that he first ended an email by "love, Benjamin", which I didn't know at the time was as significant as it was. Ben apparently never signs things that way while I always do, so I sort of missed that at first until he did it a couple of times and I noticed he hadn't before.
One of the things we spent time discussing was the concept that people who are married are meant to be like one person. The easiest way to be like one person is to consistently see and experience the same things at the same time. I began going more and more places with Ben because my goal was to stay with him. I figured the more I saw him in all the little normal everyday situations everybody's in all the time, the more I would know who he really was and the more he would really know who I was. I think people began realizing we were both serious about this when I started going to work with him in May. It was about the same time - Easter Sunday, which was in May this year - that I looked at Ben and said, "I love this man. I could spend the rest of my life with him and it would be a wonderful life."
But I didn't say anything about it and neither did Ben because it didn't seem like the right time yet.
We both knew we'd started emailing with the understanding that neither of us was interested in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship; however, just about the time we really began seeing each other a lot (in April), my younger sister Leah got engaged to her now-husband Benjamin and Ben made a few comments that led me to believe he didn't want to ask me to marry him until Leah and Benjamin's wedding was done and no longer taking so much time and energy from our family. So in June I was looking at the calender and thinking, "If he doesn't ask me until September, it's going to be at least January before we can get married."
Yes, I really was thinking that way. But no, I hadn't named our first three children yet.
Then we had a really big thunderstorm on the evening of June 21st. Ben and I both really like thunderstorms and this was one a really spectacular one. We were sitting on the Turner's back porch watching the wind and the lightning when Ben put his arm around me and rested his head against mine and said, "I love you, Lauren."
Ben still laughs because my response was, "What did you say?" and then when he repeated himself I said, "Really?!"
Hey, you can imagine something a long time and still be surprised when it finally appears. Just picture being a kid waiting for your birthday and thinking it's such a looooooong way away...and then one morning, it really is your birthday. If you remember that feeling, that's how I felt. Because for the longest time I had put thought into what kind of man I would like to marry - not how tall he'd be or what he'd look like, but who he was. And Ben is that man; and even better than simply being that kind of man, he was interested in me. More than interested: he said, "I love you." He waited a long time to say it because to say it meant something. That is not a casual thing to Ben, telling someone that he loves them. Any more casual than it is for me to hug someone.
Of course, because I knew Ben had waited because saying "I love you" means something, I sort of expected Ben to say, "Will you marry me?" but he didn't. As it turns out, he didn't because he hadn't gotten a ring and wasn't even really sure where to start with getting one; and he says he thought it was like some sort of rule that you never break to ask a girl to marry you without having a ring. I didn't know what the holdup was, but I came to the conclusion that if I were a man thinking about marrying a girl, it'd give me a lot of confidence if the girl let him know she wasn't going to turn him down when he asked her. So I did my best without actually saying, "If you ask me to marry you, I really will say yes".
On the 29th of June, we had a very, very busy day. We cleaned up the landscaping on four houses my family owns and then went to the Turner's house in the evening to work on assembling some fiberglass parts to a big project we were helping Dad Turner with. By 9:00 when we got done, we were both so tired that we parked ourselves on the glider on the back porch and didn't move for the next hour and a half, which is about the time everyone in the house went to bed. "I should really take you home," Ben said. But neither one of us was too ready to move, so we didn't. Then after a little, Ben shifted around so he was sort of sitting sideways on the glider facing me and said, "I really don't want to take you home. I want to grow old with you. I want to have a house with you. I want to have lots of babies with you. But in order to do these things, we really have to get married."
The funny thing is, he said it in such a straight-forward tone I wasn't sure if he was asking me or opening a discussion about the topic. "Are you asking me?" I said. These are the kinds of things you can say to a man who loves truthfulness.
"Yes," Ben said. "Will you marry me?"
And I said, "Of course I will. Absolutely!"
No fancy dinner, no nervousness, no staying awake all night planning, and no ring. Turns out proposals can be a lot easier than the movies make them out to be. The best part about deciding to get married was that when we reached a decision, we reached a decision and there didn't have to be any fuss about it. It was just time.
And that's how I expect marriage will remain for us. A lot of people like to say a lot of things in life are "really hard" and make a big dramatic deal about the process of any of them happening. Finding someone to marry and getting married is exciting, no doubt about that; but there's also a normalcy to it that I didn't know to expect. It's as natural to be marrying Ben as it is to eat dinner when I'm hungry, and the whole process of getting there turns out to be a lot like that too. Things do not always have to seem like a Big Deal to be important or to be special. "Special" happens everyday. It doesn't need set times or places to occur.
That's the way God made things, probably one of the reasons even his son was born on such a normal day no one really remembers for sure when it was and ended up prosaically wrapped like any other newborn and stuck in a manger to sleep. Not to be irreverent, but in a huge way he's like the man who "never made a great play" in baseball because he always just managed to be exactly where the ball was going. In God's plans, everything is arranged so neatly that you can miss it going by because it seems completely expected and natural at the time. It's only when you look back that you say, "Wow. How could that EVER have happened that way?" How could Ben and I have lived our whole lives practically in the same places at all the same times and yet meet because I met a friend of his through a friend of mine on the Internet? I've heard of people meeting by Internet before, but this is a strange combination of the normal way people used to meet - through friends - and the new way a lot of people meet - by deliberately going on the web looking to meet someone. How is it that the peculiar philosophy I happen to have could so neatly mesh with someone else who shared almost none of the same influences I'd grown up with? How could someone who never really had the impulse to match-make before spend a year trying to ignore the impulse to introduce Ben and I before she did? Only God does things like that. For that matter, why is it that Emily's son Matthew would insist on naming a baby Lauren, which is how she caught my eye and we came to meet in the first place? You can't write a book with a plotline that has those kinds of coincidences because people would say, "Oh, that's not realistic."
But it's true and the story's real; and now you probably know way more than you ever wanted to know about the whole thing!
