I was always a serious child. I liked rules, I liked routines, and I liked lists.
Maybe that’s why the youth retreat I attended when I was fifteen had such an enormous impact on my life.
I remember sitting in the dark conference room, squirming in my chair as the speaker talked about one of my least favourite topics: Boys. I was a late bloomer when it came to boys. Horses were much more interesting!
Nevertheless, I began paying attention when she started talking about a list. She explained that when she was in high school she had created a list of the qualities she was looking for in a boyfriend. If a boy didn’t possess all the qualities on her list, she wasn’t interested. We were given pen and paper and directed to create lists of our own. According to the speaker that weekend, if The Boy didn’t meet all the requirements on The List, he wasn’t the one God had chosen for us.
It seemed simple enough.
Lists were my thing, so I wholeheartedly embraced the project!
At first my list was very specific and looked something like this:
- Must love horses.
- Must love animals.
- Must be older than me.
- Must be smart.
- Must have brown hair and brown eyes.
- Must have a good sense of humor (but not a crude sense of humor).
- Must be anti-drinking/smoking.
- Must meet and be approved by my grandmother.
My list changed as I got older and actually began to develop relationships with the opposite sex. (At first I wasn’t sure if changing my list was allowed but decided it was when I realized there weren’t any boys in my entire town that fit all of my requirements!)
The List changed even more as I began to date real boys instead of fictional ones. (SPOILER ALERT FOR MY CHURCH GIRLS: TODD SPENCER ISN’T REAL!)
Items on my list that I once thought were deal breakers no longer were. I began to value traits like loyalty more than appearance and being treated with respect was more important than an undying devotion to my pet cat.
By the time I graduated from university The List had changed from that The Boy had to be to what he couldn’t be:
- Bearded. By that point in my dating career I had firmly established that I did not like beards – or facial hair of any sort. It was prickly and scratchy and my hair got stuck to it like Velcro, never mind that kissing a man with a beard was sometimes downright painful, and I was always picking hairs out of my mouth that were not my own.
- Anything but a New Brunswick boy. I was a maritimer and I wanted to stay that way.
- A pastor. I grew up in the church. I wanted nothing of the politics and nothing of the drama.
When I moved to Alberta after university I wasn’t looking for love. I wasn’t looking for any sort of romantic relationship at all, to tell you the truth. My plan was to go to school, learn what I needed to learn, and go back to New Brunswick to start a youth ranch. Boys didn’t factor into the equation at all.
Especially not Alberta boys.
Then I met Nathan and I forgot all about The List.
He was everything I didn’t want:
- David Crowder’s doppelgänger (proof here and here.) My husband has more hair on his face than our dog does on her entire body.
- An Alberta boy – and not just that, a complete city slicker who had never seen a live chicken – in real life – until he visited New Brunswick with me when he was 25.
- A pastor in every sense of the word except official job title. Nathan graduated from Bible College and worked in full-time ministry, then decided he preferred volunteer ministry positions instead of paid ones. He leads small groups, teaches Sunday School and Wee College, leads worship on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings as well as at retreats and conferences, is involved in prison ministry – the list goes on!
What I thought I wanted wasn’t what God knew I needed. That silly list seems insignificant now, after ten years together. If I could write a new list and send it to my younger self, these are the qualities I would put on it:
- Passion for God and things of God.
- Love for family.
- Patience.
Nathan meets all of those requirements easily!
He’s devoted to God and his family and he has more patience than anybody I have ever met! Who else would calmly pull over on the side of a busy highway to console his sobbing, hormonal, pregnant wife and pray for a dead coyote’s grieving family?
For the past ten years he’s been my rock.
He’s my support, he’s my encourager, he’s my inspiration.
He’s my love.
So although I’ve swallowed more beard and moustache hairs than I can count, dip my toes in the Atlantic ocean every five years instead of every weekend, and have fed my children cheerios in the church coffee shop on more Sundays (and Thursdays, and Saturdays) than I ever would have imagined – I’m happy. I’m more than happy. God has done abundantly more than I ever could have asked, or even thought to ask! - in giving me my husband.
Happy birthday, Nathan!