At our recent anniversary celebration, our daughter-in-law
read the following story, something I wrote a few years ago but had never shown
anyone. It’s about three times longer than I usually post on
this blog, but in the hope that it might honor Christ and encourage others, I
decided to include it. It’s all true.
He woke that morning, thanking God
it was Saturday. His roommate had left with his drinking buddies the night
before, so he had their small dorm room to himself for the weekend. Today he
had nothing on the horizon except to meet her for lunch.
He rolled
out of bed, showered, and pulled on some old jeans, a T-shirt and his sneakers,
the 70’s uniform of the college freshman.
Breakfast
today consisted of a candy bar he bought from the vending machine downstairs in
the lobby. Unwrapping it, he headed across campus.
That first
year he didn’t have a car, so he did a lot of walking. Any dates they had were on
campus or carefully planned around the city bus routes.
His dorm
was on the extreme northwest end of campus, and her apartment was a couple
blocks south and central, right in the middle of campus near the old chapel. He
could walk it in his sleep, and usually zoned out as he made the familiar trek
across parking lots and behind buildings to short-cut his way to her place. Her
kitchen window overlooked the front door, and he knew she would be watching for
him.
You’d have
to say they were an unlikely couple. Not that they didn’t have areas of
compatibility. Both were bookish and shy. He could be bitingly funny and she
laughed at his jokes. Both of them were planning on becoming teachers, though
lately he’d been talking about going into the ministry.
The thing
is, though, they were so young. At eighteen he was short and skinny, with long
brown hair past his collar. He looked 14. Seven months older, she was slight
and pretty, but when her eyes blinked behind her small glasses, you had the
sense she was shutting away some kind of inner pain.
You’d
probably have concluded they were together out of mutual neediness. Neither had
dated much in high school. He was the resident bookworm and egghead in a small
high school where jocks were royalty and smarts were an embarrassment. His
dad’s death four years before had set him adrift, and he was still looking for
an anchor.
Hers was a
story of childhood abuse, years of betrayal by her minister father. No wonder
she seemed brittle at times, vulnerable, and in her darker moments, filled with
self-loathing. They hadn’t talked about any of this yet; he only knew Something
had happened to her and that it was bad.
After six
months of dating, older friends at church probably saw their relationship as a
symptom of their immaturity. No one would have predicted any future for them.
But they had one thing going for
them: they both had a real connection to God, a growing Christian faith. Their
desire to serve Jesus superseded even their desire to lean on one another.
Which is why she prayed that
prayer. She was a year ahead, a sophomore, and knew the destructive power of a
campus romance. Last year she had dated a guy who had been bad news, and she
was determined never to repeat that mistake. Her childhood secret rose
like a sea monster in her dreams, and she had to force it back, down into the
murkiness of her subconscious. Her love for him made this harder somehow.
So she began to pray her odd
prayer, not really expecting an answer, but laying it before the Lord in
deference to His ability to do anything, even something so strange, if He
really wanted to.
She had been making this request of
the Lord for a couple of weeks, and finally decided today was the cut-off. As
she waited for him to show up for lunch, she knew she would finally have to
tell him why they had to break up.
She sat and fidgeted and rehearsed
what she would say. He would be upset, probably angry. But in the end he would
agree. Right now they had no future and probably never would. Their priorities
must be to grow up in their faith, to pursue mature adulthood.
He jaywalked across the street in
front of the student union, preparing to cut across the lawn in a direct line
toward her place. But on an impulse he found himself walking away, down the
sidewalk in the opposite direction.
The little corner market is gone
now, but in those days it was a place that catered to both college students and
elderly folks from the neighborhood. You could write a check without showing ID,
it was never crowded, and the prices weren’t much higher than at the chain
supermarket several miles away.
He’d been in the place only a
couple times, and never bought anything. He usually didn’t have any money
anyway.
But today, a little bewildered by
the impulse that produced his sudden detour, he crossed the busy street that
paralleled the campus, jogged another half block to the little store, and pulled
open the wooden screen door.
What the heck am I doing here? he
thought. I guess I could pick up something to help with lunch. She’ll probably
open a can of soup and I’ll still be hungry.
He ambled through the narrow
aisles, looking at loaves of bread and bags of chips, passing canned goods and
glancing briefly at the meat and deli case in the back. He rounded the corner
and saw stacks of produce.
Impulsively he grabbed a brown
paper sack and moved toward the pyramid of oranges sharing a display shelf with
a bin of apples. I don’t even know if she likes oranges, he muttered. I don’t even like oranges. So how many
do I get? Five or six, he concluded, still acting under a kind of comical
duress.
“That’s it for you, buddy?” the elderly
checker asked.. “Yup,” he replied, pushing a crumpled couple of dollars across
the counter. “Thanks.”
His small package clutched in his
left hand he headed back on course again, toward lunch and the girl he loved.
She watched from her tiny kitchen window
as he strolled up the sidewalk to the apartment building, giving her a slight
wave and a little grin as he pulled open the door to her building. He sprinted
up to the first landing and her heart pounded as she let him in. Her roommate
was also gone for the weekend. The speech she had rehearsed would be uninterrupted.
“How’s it going?” He leaned in for
a hello kiss. She barely responded. “I’m okay. But I need to talk to you.”
He plopped down on the ancient sofa
and rested his feet on her scarred coffee table. “Okay, let’s talk,” he said, looking
up at her with an expectant smile.
Still standing, she dropped her
eyes to the floor as she began. “Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about this…”
“Oh, hey, I brought you something,”
he said, interrupting and proffering the bag.
“What?” She was momentarily
rattled. “Oh, okay. What’d you get?” she asked. He shrugged and rolled his
eyes. Big spender, weird gift, he thought.
Curious now, her speech briefly
postponed, she opened the bag. And nearly dropped it. Tears sprang to her eyes
and began to roll down her cheeks. She clutched the open bag to her chest and
sniffed.
He began to apologize. “Look, I
didn’t know if you liked them or not. I just had this weird idea I should get
them, but it’s no big deal. No need to be upset. I’ll give them to my
roommate,”
“You don’t understand,” she said in
a small voice. “I thought we had to break up. You know, to work on ourselves
and not just focus on one another. To grow in our faith.”
“What? I don’t want to break up…’
“Me neither. But I thought it was
God’s will. So I prayed and asked the Lord to give me a sign.”
He still didn’t get it. “Like an
eclipse or something? That’s probably not going to happen.”
“No. Not an eclipse.” Now she was
smiling. “I prayed that if we were supposed to stay together you’d bring me a
bag of oranges.” And dropping the oranges, she flung herself into his arms.
Over forty years later, she’s still
there.
