Over the course of the next two months, things just got better and better. I enjoyed talking to Martin more, and the more I got to know him, the more I looked forward to seeing him again. We started reading a book together, and once again, we discovered that we shared a lot of the same attitudes and concerns about so many things. Martin always struck me as a disciplined, goal-oriented, hard-working man, but I was a little embarrassed when I was the one catching up to him in our reading (since we were reading in my first language.)
The more I talked to Martin, the more I wanted to talk to him and share with him. (Yep, you can feel sorry for Martin right about now.) And the more I got to know him, the more I wanted to learn about him.
I don't remember much of what happened between March and May, but over that period of two months, I found myself imagining doing everything with him-- planning things with him, going on trips with him, spending quiet time with him, going on adventures with him…. and the list goes on. I also imagined spending time with him at the end of a great day, and at the end of a rough day.
This period of two months was a little weird, as I was imagining the potential for the future. And over the course of these two months, the "potential" slowly turned into a likely reality. Through all of this, God gave me so much peace.
Then came my trip to the Netherlands. I arrived into a new country, where I didn't recognize the airport, I didn't recognize any of the names on road signs, I didn't recognize the landscape, the trucks looked different, the highways were smaller, the licence plates were different -- all I knew was Martin. As I sat in his van driving from the airport to Barneveld for the first time, I remember a moment when we were silent, and I thought "TL… you are CRAZY!" … and yes. I WAS crazy! This WAS a crazy adventure that I was on. But, I felt safe in every way. Up until this point, there were no "red flags". Theoretically, there were many things that had the potential to go wrong, but there were so many things that pointed away from that, and towards this actually being a good thing. I would have called it a very calculated risk. In my mind, IF Martin was actually the man who he seemed to be, then I was more than willing to take this risk. My biggest fear at that point was that one of us would discover something significant that would lead us to end the relationship-- something that we couldn't discover through conversations. But once again, neither of us discovered any bad surprises, and we enjoyed our time together in the Netherlands even more than Martin's trip to Canada. It was SO nice to be with Martin, seeing his hometown, and meeting his family and friends. Once again, everything that I saw and heard while over there, confirmed that Martin WAS in fact, the same man that I had gotten to know over the last 9 months… even better, actually. Of course, it was nice to be welcomed so warmly by such a great family and friends over there too!
We then had two weeks before Martin was back in Canada-- and at this point, we were talking very seriously about getting married, and I knew that he was planning to bring a ring over with him (and I was glad to know this, so that I could plan our time appropriately.) Of course there are lots of other good stories that happened along the way-- like how I went to the wrong terminal to pick Martin up, and how he almost fell into a mostly-frozen swamp on our first walk together, and how sometimes the other person can hear you, even if you don't think the video-call has started yet, or how Martin corrects TL's grammar ... but we'll save those for real life conversations.
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