[Finding My Voice is a series of blog posts on key decisions I made in my 20s.]
Defining decision: Giving love a chance
photo credit: qthomasbower via photopin cc
The decision to begin dating Tim (courting, to be more precise) was made in faith. At the time, I was preparing to head to East Asia for three years of missionary work. But I couldn’t deny that something was happening in my friendship with Tim.
Tim was the first guy that I truly felt comfortable being around. He was funny, intelligent and intentional. I felt like I could really trust him. A couple months before we had “the conversation,” he had initiated a weekly book study with me. I thought it was a little strange to be doing a weekly study with a guy, but I thought the topic was generic enough that I didn’t feel like I had to go deep if I didn’t want to.
I was living in Toronto at the time, and he was in Vancouver. I had a work training to attend in Vancouver though so we ended up hanging out for a weekend. After that weekend, our correspondence picked up; our emails and text messages became much more frequent. Part of me felt excited, but honestly, part of me was freaked out.
Finally, a few weeks later, I mustered up the courage to ask him what he thought about the rate at which our friendship was developing. We agreed to step back for a couple weeks to pray and discern whether to keep moving forward, or to dial things back a notch.
Those two weeks were pivotal for me. I woke up early each day to sit in the quietness of the morning, and asked God what I should do. I felt like I had two roads in front of me; roads that seemed to go in opposite directions. One path led to Asia, the other path to Tim. Which would it be? I wondered.
All along, I had wanted to date someone and eventually get married. But I had arrived at the point where I thought I would be happily single for a long time to come. So planning to move to Asia for a few years seemed like the right path to take.
One morning, however, I had the sense that God was saying “Yes,” to both. It puzzled me but I decided to take His word for it. Courtship was the process of discerning whether or not we were to be married, so even if in the end the answer was no, I trusted that God would work it out.
I have been asked by others, “What made you decide to date Tim?” Frankly, it was because I took a chance on God’s “Yes.”
In retrospect, I really barely knew Tim. We lived on opposite sides of the country. And I didn’t have any butterflies-in-my-stomach romantic feelings toward him at first. But I decided to give love a chance. And that was one of the most influential decisions I made in my twenties. It changed the trajectory of my life.
(For Tim’s perspective that he wrote shortly after we started dating, visit here.)