I’m sneaking in a Tuesday night blog post because I’ve missed a pretty important milestone for us recently with all the chaos of the last few weeks.

10 Years ago on August 19th, Derek walked up to a bench at North Greenville College and said “Hi.” to a quiet introvert freshman who was slightly ticked that her film camera had just locked up due to her dorm being so uncomfortably cold and, therefore, had missed a beautiful sunset shot.  I was writing in my prayer journal and I really didn’t want to be bothered.  When I looked up, I panicked a bit since with his gigantic glasses, he looked a bit like someone I had once known and didn’t want to see at my new college.  Even though I was pretty cranky, I tried to be polite and gave him the chance to talk a little.

Derek had serious jet lag (he’d only be back from Australia for a little bit of time) and was very talkative.  When I say very talkative, I mean I didn’t get rid of him for 3 hours :-p  I don’t remember a whole lot about those conversations.  I think I talked about Olivia and Sue and The Little Prince.  And I remember telling him when I was ready for bed that I liked him.  And I remember that he cried when I said that (jet lag, folks… j-e-t  l-a-g).

The next day, I needed to learn how to go to Wal-mart.  He picked me up in his Ford blaring D.C. Talk (totally not the type of music you expect a gigantic glasses nerd to be blaring), and drove me over what I thought was a cliff (but was really just a side road that went sharply downhill).

It definitely wasn’t love at first sight (at least on my side), but Derek won me over with his corny jokes, ready laugh, and soft sharing of his heart.

I’m still pretty lucky that he said “Hi.”