With the Christmas season and the other blog posts I have been working on the last month, I didn’t get around to my “Story of Us” series. I know you’ve all been sitting on the edge of your seats wondering when I was going to share how we got back together! Well… for those of you just dying to hear what happened, here we go…
In my last post, I talked about how we broke up for five months and how those months were very hard and challenging, but also grew and taught me a lot about myself and how much I needed to depend on the Lord and not find my worth in being with a guy. Since the Lord had revealed to me that I would one day marry Josh and in December, I had TRULY finally given it up to him, I felt such a peace and didn’t worry anymore.
So when we got back to school in January, I went with no expectations or goals of pursing Josh like I had the previous fall semester; but there I was, finding Josh calling me to hang out again, just the two of us. That January (of 2005) was unseasonably warm. And the only reason why I remember this is because most of our time spent together when we would hang out was riding bikes and I remember wearing tank tops and shorts when we went out. We would go out once or twice a week and ride Viking Trail, a 3 mile biking/running trail that went from Main Campus to Mountain Campus; and this was how we spent most of our time together on our own that first month we were back to school. It gave us a lot of time to talk and just enjoy each other without the pressure of wondering “what’s going to happen next?” I still remember those bike rides together and remember them with such fondness. I knew something was shifting when one day after we rode, he asked me to go lay down in the field with him and talk. I don’t know what we talked about and it wasn’t anything significant about us, but in that moment, I felt a shift in how things were going… but despite this shift, there was still a lot of up and down and back and forth before we got back together.
Let me diverge for a quick second and share a parallel story of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. During this time of Josh and me possibly getting back together, my good friend, Rachel had a crush on Josh’s younger brother, Daniel. Rachel and I had chemistry class together that year at 8am; and many mornings, we found ourselves sharing stories of the guys and the sweet things they would do only to come back a week later and talk about how lame and vague they were being. We laugh now, but it was like they literally were in cahoots with each other. Josh would do something sweet and then Daniel would too. Daniel would ignore Rachel for a few days; Josh would do the same! It was pretty maddening, but we laughed that these two brothers (who didn’t hang out really at school) would be behaving almost the same way simultaneously.
So back to the main part of the story… The WinShape College Program, in which Josh was a part of, went on a spiritual retreat every spring, and they allowed Main Campus students (like me) to join if we wanted. It was always awesome that even though I wasn’t in WinShape, they invited me and let me go on many of their trips during college. During that trip, I had a conversation with Daniel that he needed to stop dragging Rachel along and either decide he liked her or move on. He told me at the trip that he didn’t want to date her, so I told her, and she had decided “that was that”… Daniel must have changed his tune after our conversation, because a few weeks later, they were a couple and they have been married now for over seven years! I like to think I put a fire under him to motivate him to be with her!
At that same spiritual retreat, I found Josh seeking me out to sit with me at things and be around me. He was flirting with me and making me think that we were going to be getting back together, so when we got back from the retreat, I had another DTR (define the relationship) talk with him about what was going on. I told him I was okay if we weren’t getting back together, but that he needed to understand that if we were going to remain friends that he could not flirt and lead me on. He told me that he didn’t want to get back together with me; and I was genuinely okay with his answer. I didn’t cry and I knew that whether he knew it or not, we would be back together one day. Well he pulled a “Daniel” because the following week, he called me to go on our second first date. A week after Daniel and Rachel started dating, Josh and I were back together. (Like brother, like brother!)
The rest is really history. Josh and I dated the rest of college and got engaged on April 1, 2007. I’ll share one last installment in a few weeks on The Story of Us | The Proposal. For now, I’ll leave you with a handful of pictures of the two of us during college after we got back together!
Winter break 2005: Joshua grew his hair out long and had a giant Grizzly Adams beard!
A week later at Passion 2006 when Josh shaved and cut his hair!
Picture of Rachel and me at the WinShape spiritual retreat the following year (February 2006), both dating Mitchell men, to eventually be sister-in-laws!
Spring break 2006: Trip to Jacksonville to visit my sister
April 2006: Semi-formal our junior year
Senior year 2007 (we were engaged already here!)
College graduation! On our way to a job at Georgia Pacific in Atlanta and a teaching job at Autrey Mill MS… and getting married in six months!
