My Love, My Valentine (Part 1)

Even if the sun refused to shine

Even if romance ran out of rhyme

You would still have my heart

Until the end of time.

- Jim Brickman – 

Last February, my sweet blogging friend Erin Morris asked me to write a guest feature on her blog. {Erin’s blog is beautiful, inspiring, and always puts a smile on my face - I hope you’ll stop by!} I shared our love story in two parts, and as Valentine’s Day rolls around again, marking 13 years since I met the boy who changed everything, I wanted to share the story for my own readers as well…

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PART ONE

 Every girl dreams of finding her Prince Charming, and I was certainly no exception. My earliest childhood recollections are steeped in hopes and dreams of finding The One. Would it be a chance encounter, a deep soul knowledge the moment our eyes met? Or would we be childhood best friends, drifting softly into an unlikely romance? Would he be handsome, dashing, dangerous, ordinary? A rebel? The boy next door? My imaginings ran wild – evidenced even at five years old when I wrote in my first diary with huge, sprawling letters: “When I grow up, I want to marry *insert name of my first crush* and live on a farm with six dogs, three horses, and four cats.”

As I got older I fell for various boys with increasing intensity. I read dozens of novels and roamed our secluded back yard for hours, spinning elaborate castles in the air filled with children and pets, captained by whoever I was enamored with at the time. Mercifully, none of the boys in question ever knew how hard I fell for them and how devastated I was when they didn’t appear to notice or return my interest. My one-sided love affairs were harmless enough, and as I got ready to graduate high school they were replaced by dreams of an illustrious journalism career. My air castles were traded in for dreams of traveling the world as a daring war correspondent, dodging bombs and air raids and perhaps falling in love with a wounded soldier after I’d pocketed a Pulitzer.

What I hadn’t counted on was that my very own Prince Charming would show up at my front door on Valentine’s Day 2006. I was seventeen and hosting a houseful of fellow students at our weekly youth group meeting, and bounded to open the door when the doorbell rang for the dozenth time. A visiting Baptist preacher from North Carolina stood on the porch with his two tall sons and wide-eyed daughter. I locked eyes with the older son, and my breath caught. Nathan Farlow was dark-haired and Southern, with eyes like the sea, a perpetual tan and the lithe body of an all-American athlete. He wore the widest and whitest smile I’d ever seen, and it seemed to never leave his face – his personal invitation to the whole world to stop a minute and get to know him. We quickly discovered our shared love of country music, and spent most of that spring on the phone for hours – discussing school projects, driving tests, college applications, faith, politics, and our dreams for the future. We were sworn best friends and nothing more, but my visions of a Pulitzer threatened to be replaced by dreams of becoming Mrs. Nathan Farlow one day. With each conversation my conviction deepened that he was everything on my list of future husband qualities, plus so much more I’d never thought to add.

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When Nathan skipped a family wedding to attend my high school graduation, adrenaline pumped thick and hot through my veins. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was about to turn into something real – something I’d waited for my whole life. Late that night, as the last party guests left for home, Nathan and my dad disappeared for a mysterious conversation. Dad gave him permission to express his feelings for me, and Nathan – knowing full well that we were each leaving for four years at our respective colleges – asked me to be his girlfriend. Before we’d ever met we had each pledged not to casually date around, but to save ourselves for a relationship that could potentially lead to marriage. The very commitment to a long-distance courtship felt almost as weighty as an engagement.

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Within mere months of officially dating we were convinced that we could never marry anyone else, and the four years stretching ahead of us seemed an eternity to wait. But like Jacob, so blinded by his love for Rachel that the seven years he worked for her felt like mere days, we would have waited forever for each other. Because we’d committed to physical purity before marriage, we paced our physical intimacy as slowly as we possibly could. We waited one year to hold hands, two years to say I love you, three years – and engagement! – to kiss. Some may have called us prudish, or sexually stifled. Quite the contrary. Our physical boundaries gave us ample time to deepen our friendship, an unshakable foundation for a healthy relationship that did not ebb and flow with mere physical connection and attraction. We were soulmates, best friends, and kindred spirits, and our physical boundaries, though frustrating, were a blessing that kept us from compromising in areas that we would one day regret. Each stage of physical intimacy was indescribably beautiful and fulfilling, because we had waited and, as Solomon urged, “not awakened love before its time.”

Nathan, my prince, my knight in shining armor, married me on June 20, 2010. I walked down the aisle towards that dazzling smile in a flood of relieved tears. All those girlish dreams and imaginings had led me on a pathway straight to him…only him. There could never be anyone else. He was the perfect fulfillment of each and every one of my longings, handcrafted by a loving God just for me, and I for him. We said “I do,” and our kiss was one of almost ethereal bliss. We were finally, at long last, home.

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I do not exaggerate when I say that the following four years of marriage were a taste of heaven on earth. The long years of loving, learning, fighting, and waiting for each other had primed us for a fairytale marriage. It was such an indescribable relief to wake up together, knowing that we would never have to say goodbye again. I kept waiting for the difficulty of marriage to hit. Everyone always cautioned about “when the honeymoon ended.” For me, it never did. Even going to the bank or the gas station was a thrill because it meant I got to be with him. Every day with him was the new best day of my life. I couldn’t imagine it ever getting better. The only thing that marred my perfect happiness was a nagging twinge of foreboding that it was too good. This level of perfection seemed unattainable for the long run. Would something happen somewhere along the way to mess it all up?

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~*~

On October 5, 2014, I am nursing our three-week-old daughter, Elissa Rose, in our bed. It is early morning, and I’d woken up to a text that Nathan had sent several hours before that he had finished night shift at work and was heading home early. I’m in a fog of sleepless new-motherhood, but something does not feel right. He should have been home long before now. I rationalize. Maybe he stopped on an errand, got stuck in traffic. (At 5 a.m. on a Sunday?) He’s fine, I assure myself. If something had happened there would be someone at my door.

And the instant the thought crosses my mind, there is a loud knock at the front door.

To Be Continued

Raising a Real-Life Princess

"It is love that marks a true daughter of the King."

- Angela Elwell Hunt -

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When I was a girl, princesses and royalty were neither here nor there. I was much more interested in street hockey and lightsaber battles with my brothers than in Cinderella, Jasmine, or Pocahontas. I grew up in a conservative home where most Disney movies were off-limits (I watched them for the first time as a teenager when I was babysitting!), and I had no aspirations to raise my children steeped in fairytale lore. But from the moment I held my own little princess in my arms, everything pink and sparkly and whimsical pulled me in. I suddenly wanted to dress my girl and decorate her room to reflect the royalty I instinctively felt in her. Little did I know that within the first few weeks of Elissa's life, she would encounter a shattering loss much like those that shape many of Walt Disney's famous princesses. When she was less than a month old, Elissa lost her daddy. Like my baby girl, the Disney princesses are no strangers to heartache. Cinderella, Belle, Jasmine, and Mulan grow up without a mother. Aurora and Rapunzel spend their childhoods separated from their parents. Tiana's father dies, leaving her to carry out their dreams alone. Elsa and Anna's parents are lost at sea. And the list goes on. Nearly every princess has suffered a traumatic loss early in childhood that shapes them and makes them a heroine. 

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I took Elissa on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Disney World for her fourth birthday, and she was in princess heaven. She spent hours waiting in lines to meet the princesses and get pictures and autographs. In her four-year-old grasp of reality, she was meeting the actual princesses! She chose to forego rides, treats, and toys in favor of filling her autograph book. We were both enchanted! Watching her, spellbound and starry-eyed in the presence of royalty, my heart swelled with gratefulness that she has such wholesome role models to look up to. As she gets older and learns more of these princess's stories, she will identify with them in the pain of their losses. She will be inspired by Aurora's grace, Belle's beauty, Rapunzel's courage, Ariel's bravery, and Cinderella's kindness. She will see that, rather than pitying themselves and their circumstances, these young women chose to rise above the pain of loss and touch the world around them with extraordinary kindness and grace. And so I unashamedly dress my daughter in beautiful dresses, reenact princess stories with her for hours, and read the same beloved tales until we can both recite every word. I want her to know without a doubt that she IS a princess, a daughter of the one true King, and be inspired to live out her own compelling drama on earth with the life she's been given. 

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Wasted

If the most precious gift we have is time—

Why would we want to kill it?

-Ben Sasse-

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 I vividly remember getting ready for bed late one night years ago in Houston as Nathan pounded steadily away on his laptop, working on a dashboard he was creating in his “off hours” for Literacy Advance, the nonprofit whose board he had joined as a volunteer earlier that year. Finally, at my urging, he reluctantly powered down the laptop and called it a night.

“Why do people have to sleep?” he groaned as he flopped on the bed beside me. “It’s such a waste of time. We could accomplish so much more in life if we just stayed awake!”

I remember being amazed at his tenacity. After a long day of work I was more than ready to snuggle down in my cozy bed and surrender consciousness to blissful hours of sleep. But to Nathan, coming home from work was just the beginning of a long evening of tasks he was passionate about and couldn’t wait to start.

My conviction that Nathan was truly one of a kind in this regard has only grown in the years since he’s been gone. Our generation is increasingly obsessed with all manner of time-killers, particularly in the electronic form. Netflix binging, games, social media, and communication forms of all kinds steal our time in staggering amounts. A personal example is the book list I made at the beginning of 2018. I excitedly chose 12 books of different genres and posted a photo, vowing to read a book a month and write a book review so I didn’t promptly forget what I’d read. To my utter chagrin I finished a total of three books and only wrote reviews on two. To be fair, I listened to other books on Audible and read many chapter books with Elissa – but I am haunted by the nine books on my list that never even got cracked open last year. What stole the time that I should have devoted to reading and digesting those books?

If I am honest, it was the mindless rut that I fell into every evening after Elissa was in bed. Exhausted from a day of parenting struggles, homeschooling, traveling, home projects, and all manner of other things, I’d reason that I owed it to myself to relax, to chill – i.e. to veg on my phone while the evening slipped away from me. The inevitable result was that I never felt rested and invigorated by that time spent on my phone. Instead I was always shocked to realize what time it was. I felt robbed of those minutes that I’d had such high hopes for; they were stolen from me. They were wasted.

Our phones are addicting, and have been ingeniously engineered to meet our specific habits and preferences in such a tailor-made way that they become indispensable to living. The average American checks their phone every 4 minutes, and if you’re like me, “checking my phone” can quickly turn into chasing a rabbit trail that spirals out of control – clicking this link, reading that article, scrolling those photos – and before I know it 20 minutes have been lost forever.

If I’m going to break the hold that media has on me, I need to be smarter than my smartphone. I need to take a careful look at my electronic habits, anticipate the moments when I’m tired or stressed and most susceptible to distraction, and set myself up for success. This might mean keeping my phone in my bedroom, silencing my notifications so that I’m only alerted to phone calls (this was the original purpose of a phone anyhow, and if the need is urgent people can call!), designating 5-10 minutes each day to catch up on social media (because guaranteed, nothing has happened in a day that deserves more than 5-10 minutes of my time), and keeping books strategically around the house where I can pick them up and read a few pages instead of scrolling through Facebook and Instagram.

As Ben Sasse so insightfully points out in The Vanishing American Adult, time has historically been our most valuable resource, and this generation is obsessed to an unprecedented degree with wasting it. Tellingly, we call the hugely popular pastime of binge drinking "getting wasted” because, not only are you good for nothing when you are blackout drunk, but the hangover the next day is time wasted and never recovered. Drinking isn’t just a waste of time – but of faculties, resources, and good judgment. It can and does result in the waste of lives. My husband – who lived each moment with incredible purpose and insatiable drive – was killed by a young woman almost lethally drunk. Not only did she waste her own life and leave her daughter an orphan, she stole the resources and potential of a new father with a family and unbelievably bright future ahead of him. It is tragic that these losses are commonplace. Our generation is in bondage to wasted lives and the terrible consequences that often result. Losing my husband at 26 has forced me to ask the question: what is more tragic? A short, full life lived to the hilt, or a long, empty life wiled away in meaningless past times?

Given my track record from last year, I’m a bit wary of setting concrete goals for myself this year. Instead, I am dedicated to creating habits that will breed lasting change. I’m sending them out into the cybersphere so that I have no excuse not to live up to them. Firstly, I vow to go to bed on time so that I can get up early in the mornings and write – something that I am deeply passionate about. Second, I vow to beat my smartphone at its own game by relegating it to another room and only engaging when it can be of some use to me. Third, I vow to fill my days with meaningful thought, work, play, and learning so that the downtime doesn’t encroach on my personal goals and development. I vow to be present for my daughter in her formative moments, leaving her a legacy of meaningful relationship – never that she had to compete with a beeping screen for my attention.

What are your goals for this year? Leave a comment below, and let’s be a community that spurs each other on in not wasting our lives.