Twenty-Five Years Ago Today--Waiting for my Sweetheart

Twenty-five years ago today I was still waiting for my sweetheart.

Still checking the mailbox anxiously 25 years ago today.  

Now 25 years later my oldest and youngest daughters are happily holding the baby of a sweet young couple who weren't even born yet.

The sweetheart whose letters I was so anxiously waiting for was showing pictures to friends this Sunday afternoon, photos of his 44th Mission Helps trip, the one he took to Guatemala in the last two weeks.

And my oldest son who will be on call tomorrow with his "red bag" to leave on one hour's notice for deployment to fight very real wildland fires,  

is, however, today literally climbing the walls to dangle a ball down with a long string for his dog down below at the bottom of the stairs.

 Yeah, he actually did that, and on Sunday morning before church, to boot!

 Jonathan managed to capture it on camera!

Twenty-five years ago today I kept going down to check the mailbox.
I didn't know the happiness that awaited me in only a matter of weeks.

 I had gotten Jonathan's first letter in Ukraine in September, hand-delivered by other missionaries who had just arrived in Ukraine, the Durfees. I waited a few weeks before sending my response, not sure at all if I should go ahead with a relationship by mail or not. 

But that first letter to Jonathan never reached him. 

One or two months later, I was afraid my letter had been lost in the mail,

yet afraid that it had not, that indeed he had gotten my letter and he had been turned off!
It was a very difficult time!

I wrote again.

Lacking confidence in my ability to write an acceptable letter, since Jonathan hadn't responded to my first one, I let my coworker read it to make sure it was okay.

She read it out loud, adding all sorts of juicy comments which had me rolling with laughter.

However, it passed inspection.

Later the next day, after having sent the letter, I made the mistake of asking my coworker's fiance what he would have advised about writing a second time.

He said he would have waited another week. 

"In a few days," he said, "you're going to get a letter, and then you'll be sooo embarrassed."

He probably made certain droll faces and eye rolls and such like to add to the surety and truth of the facts he was saying.

I wrote in my diary, "My heart sank to the ocean floor...I was so upset that I left them at the elevator and walked the street for half an hour, and then went to my room and wrote a poem..."

But the fact was, the facts Mr. Other Lady's Fiance said were not true. 

Jonathan never had gotten that first letter, and he had been waiting in deep despair for months!

He got that second letter one whole month after I wrote it. 

And his response took another month to reach me!
To this day we don't know why God allowed that terribly long delay, because every other letter we wrote or that anyone else wrote to us only took about 9 days to reach their destinations.
Perhaps God knew that I would not value Jonathan as much if I got his letter sooner without the discipline of waiting,
or that he wouldn't value me as much without having to wait.
But the long wait made us eager for each other, and God used that to knit our hearts together when things may have been different otherwise. 

Suddenly, hope was shining its lovely rays at the ends of our dark and lonely tunnels. 

But still it was lonely. It took so long to get letters back and forth. I was afraid writing too often would appear that I was chasing, yet I was so desperately lonely that I resorted again and again to penning letters to the young man clear across the world. 

Twenty-five years later, two Thursdays ago, I'm surprised by a letter in the mail from my Jonathan who was in Guatemala--addressed to 

simply

"Sweetheart"!

The mailman figured it out okay!

And my handsome prince was thinking about all that had transpired in the last 25 years--and how much mail still means to his wife! So two weeks ago he wrote me after I left him at the hotel in Denver near the airport on his way to Guatemala on a 10-day Mission Helps trip. 

True, it was just a page torn out of his tablet, and not torn exactly straight, either, but a love letter nonetheless!

Twenty-five years after his first letter to me, I slipped this newest letter inside my Bible. 

Memories of those long, long months of waiting--

of one coworker trying to set me up with a young Russian man named Sergei, a very sincere and talented young Christian who wrote poetry,

of me heading to the Russian supermarket to buy a prettier scarf when I knew Jonathan would be coming to Ukraine, and letting my friend Tatyana teach me how to wear it right.

"I will teach you how to dress," she said, "so when your young man comes from America, you will be pretty!"

I still don't know how to wear a scarf right, and I'm still not very pretty, but my young man looked beyond all that. He did notice that I could cook.

Twenty-five years later, his wife is making potato/ham chowder and deviled eggs for supper for his mother's 81st birthday, along with strawberry cream pie made by Rose, while he is climbing a Guatemalan volcano thousands of miles away!

And she is making a spaghetti supper for him the day he comes home, doing his laundry, teaching his kids, cleaning his house.

And making a taco salad meal two days later for a young couple who asked to stop in yesterday.

 We had met them when we took the 5-day training at Caring for the Heart where this newly engaged couple also was involved, along with her parents and a number of others.

 Nick and Katrina invited us to their wedding several months later, and now, almost a year and a half later, they have a little baby and were spending the weekend in Colorado Springs,

so asked if they could stop in.

 We enjoyed sharing with each other about their overseas ventures and ours, the missionary endeavors of their close relatives and our Mission Helps trips,  showing them the pictures from Guatemala, 

bringing in baby bunnies, and loving on their sweet little one.

Just before they left, I suggested we pray together, and Jonathan agreed.

To our amazement, this young couple stepped forward, her with her arm around me, and Nick with his arm around Jonathan, and both us couples with our arms around each other.

Four heads bowed, while our children watched and listened.

Jonathan prayed for them, and then Nick asked to pray for us.

He asked the Lord to bless us as we live quiet and humble lives--

then he corrected himself.

"Well," he laughed, inside his prayer, "maybe not exactly quiet, with all the wild things they do!"

But then he went on, asking the Lord again to bless our lives.

He does. 

Our quiet but wild, humble but crazy lives.

Twenty-five years of them so far.