For The Record: How I Met My Husband Part 2

It is my hope that my husband will join me in these posts, perhaps as my special guest blogger, because his opinions are rather funny. He still talks about his reaction to me, when he first saw me. He is actually the one that coined the term "Meat Market" in regards to the church singles ministry. But his remembrance of me upon first meeting me goes something like this "Wow. That girl is just too cute to be single. What is she doing here? She must have a kid or something. Wonder what kind of baggage she has."

I guess my baggage was mostly, oh....dating bad boys. A dude with an ankle bracelet, and before that guy, well....I just better not even go there. The details are just too pitiful to go into. I had done my round of what I call "Missionary Dating." I was a born again Christ-Follower, doing the best I could to live for God. With little or no example of what Christian dating was supposed to look like. So, I dated many guys....some Christians, some not, some I thought that I could fix by bringing them to church, and some I was just hanging out with hoping that they would get saved. Hence, the term, missionary dating.

The point is, I wasn't ready for the man of my dreams. And the man of my dreams wasn't ready for me either. God had alot of work to do.

Sometime after things didn't quite work out with ankle bracelet guy, and I had broken up with yet another guy, I gave up on dating. Actually, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, literally. I felt like I was done with it. I was fed up with dating and was prepared to just let God do the choosing for me. It was springtime at this point, and I was ready for absolutely nothing to happen in the love department.

I made up a list. A crazy, detailed list of all the qualities in a guy that I desired, and another list of qualities that I didn't like. And I simply prayed over my list, stuck it in a box, and put the box on the top shelf of my closet. For God to take care of. I would take a picture of this list, and post it here, as I still have it, but for one, you wouldn't be able to read my chicken scratch for handwriting, and secondly some of the qualities are too deeply personal to state out here in the open for all the world to see. But suffice to say that it was a long wist. Quite the tall order for God to fill.

Some of the items on here say: a born again believer, hardworking, sense of humor, giving, easy to love and gives love, understanding when I goof up, Listens, honest, gives compliments, knows when to say he's sorry, intellegent, good looking, and the list goes on.....way on. And very near the top of the qualities that I did not want in a guy: a smoker. Now, I am not here to judge anyone that is a smoker, and there are several here that read my blog. If you are a smoker, that's your own business. But a smoker is simply not a quality that I wanted in a man. And that is an important detail to remember, because of my previous post, in which I first met my husband. Where he had cigarettes stuck in the front of his shirt pocket. Which I found disgusting.

The next part of the story I will most definitely have to have my husband help with, because it involves his heart condition. And then there is Jack. We can't leave Jack out of this story. And how the other love of my life, Jack, became Eben's roommate.