I seem to have a lot of stories to tell about fires. There was that time I blew up our kitchen. Then the time when our electric box decided to self-immolate at 2 am. This story, however, is only incidentally about fire, especially since there actually was no fire. It was a false alarm. No, this story is really about my first date with the girl who would one day become my wife. There is a fire alarm which plays a prominent part in how things go down. But we’ll get to that in due time.
True, we didn’t call our first date a ‘date’ per se. I had enough sense about me to leave that title out of it and to let things proceed in the category of ‘open secret.’ Every culture has this category somewhere or other in their interpersonal interactions. And since my wife and I are Westerners, we stayed true to our people and used this category at the beginning of our relationship in order to decrease awkwardness and to protect an easy out for either party involved, should that turn out to be needed. In this way, I was also trying not to be like some of the other guys who were serenading girls on campus with Calvinistic hymns and telling them far too much about their intentions, far too soon. I knew that the girl I was interested in had had her fair share of that sort of pursuit, so my hope was to keep things very casual, low-pressure, and in good taste.
Instead, I chose to ask her, tongue-in-cheek, if she’d be up for getting tea together and talking some more about the Holy Spirit. Yes, it was still very much a cheesy Bible college invitation, but not one without context. See, I had only recently returned from a gap year in the Middle East. And some pretty wild things had happened during that year. Friends had had dreams about Bible verses they’d never read, one woman was miraculously healed, I had narrowly survived a car bomb, and multiple friends had left Islam and risked everything to follow Jesus. I had become a cautious continuationist the year before that while a freshman at John Piper’s church. But even if that theological shift hadn’t taken place, the things I had seen the Holy Spirit do right in front of my eyes in the Middle East had left me convinced that the Spirit was more actively involved in day-to-day life and ministry than I had previously counted on. All of it left me eager to talk with other believers about what I had seen, and also about what they had seen and were learning.
The strange thing was, I initially had the hardest time finding other Bible college students who wanted to discuss these things in good faith. Sure, people wanted to debate theological positions. But very few seemed interested in conversations about how God was working overseas and what in the world it meant for us to practically ‘be being filled with the Spirit’ in our day-to-day walks with Jesus. Some were more interested in smoking pipes and playing board games. One guy I remember wanted to argue with me that it was not possible that God was sending dreams to Muslims. Another guy maintained that the Great Commission was actually fulfilled by the original Apostles, so modern missions was basically unnecessary. This latter student waxed eloquent about this while inconveniently sitting between me and the pretty missions major that I had been hoping to get a chance to talk with.
At last, an opportunity came to talk with this girl. I had been told by close mutual friends that she had grown up in a sort of ‘Bapticostal’ background and had a heart to work among Muslim women. I had noticed from afar that she was a keen thinker who didn’t engage in the sort of theological banter that was often more like a competition of intellectual prowess than a genuine conversation. Now, lest you get the wrong idea about the school I went to, I have not seen this sort of culture among the undergrads to be the norm over the years. I think I just kept running into the wrong guys or simply found myself among a very peculiar crop of students who loved to talk theology, but didn’t really want to talk about Jesus as if he were a real person involved in our lives. Don’t get me wrong. I loved to talk about theology – just not when it seemed like a decapitated head whose body had gone AWOL. My friends had risked their lives for Jesus in the Middle East. This stuff mattered.
A friend had set up an early morning prayer meeting for the nations. And it was right after this that I found myself having breakfast in the cafeteria and finally able to have a good conversation with the girl I had been hoping to connect with for several months. To my great joy, she seemed engaged and just as relieved as I was by the tenor of our conversation. We had to rush off to class but I felt that, at last, I had a good and non-creepy opportunity to pursue further conversation.
For her part, rather than being put off by my follow-up message about tea and conversation about the Holy Spirit, it made her smile. We made a plan to meet at her dormitory on a Saturday afternoon. From there, we would walk to the nearest off-campus coffee shop, a small Heine Bros. Coffee on Frankfort Avenue.
It was a pleasantly warm October afternoon when I found myself walking up the steep hill on the back side of the SBTS campus, heading to the girls’ dormitory. As I slowly made my way up the hill, I told myself to be calm and to keep things fun, casual, and low-key. I was nervous since this was my first time asking a girl out for conversation like this in quite some time. But how bad could it be? She and I would just take a simple walk to a coffee shop, talk, sip tea, and get to know one other. Hopefully, we could at least build a new friendship without any of the unnecessary college rumors or drama.
But as I came to the top of the hill I was met with a terrifying sight. Seated in the parking lot between me and the dormitory door was what amounted to a sea of young women. It seemed that every single college girl who lived on campus was there, sitting on the ground. There had to be sixty or seventy of them – and every single head turned to stare at me as I cautiously approached the edge of their giant half circle.
Thoroughly confused and feeling my face cycling through various shades and temperatures, I frantically scanned the mass of sitting women to see if I could spot the girl I was supposed to be going out with. The following moments were probably only a few seconds long, but what it actually felt like was perhaps put best by Gandalf the White: “Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time. The stars wheeled overhead and every day was as long as a life age of the earth.”
What was this, some kind of intimidation technique? Did the girls at this school have some kind of wolf pack agreement with one another that when a new guy asked one out for coffee, the sisterhood must make a show of intimidating force? I mean, I knew that the girl I was interested in was well-known, well-liked, and well-respected on campus. Everyone seemed to know her. The terrors of a third culture kid who has stumbled upon some unknown context in their home culture – and doesn’t know what it means and what the rules are – were fast taking over.
At last, my date-not-date turned her head and recognized me. It seemed that she had been the only girl in the crowd who had not noticed me walking up. She stood up. Now, we were two lonely towers standing as it were in a great field of undergraduates, staring up at us like so many wide-eyed sunflowers.
“Hi,” I said, awkwardly.
“Hi,” she said, just as awkwardly.
The two of us stood there. Sixty or seventy college girls squinted up at me, then squinted up at her.
“What’s going on?” I asked, motioning around at all of the girls sitting on the pavement.
“Fire alarm,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “There was a fire?”
“No,” she said. “False alarm.”
“Oh.”
I’m pretty sure at this point that I could no longer see, that I had gone utterly snow blind from embarrassment. Somewhere, a bird chirped. One of the girls cleared her throat.
“Well… uh… you ready to go?” I asked.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
She picked her way through the crowd and the two of us walked away, trying desperately to make small talk – and trying in vain not to feel sixty or seventy pairs of eyes boring into the back of our heads. Whatever hopes I’d had for our little outing to be casual, cool, and low-key were by this point completely dashed. Everyone would now know that that new guy who had been in the Middle East or something had taken their beloved friend and classmate out for a date. Welp, at least it wasn’t some sort of intentional intimidation. The unintentional kind was rough enough.
As you can imagine, from there our don’t-call-it-a-date could only get better. By the time we had made it to the coffee shop, we had recovered our ability to converse like normal human beings. We both ordered tea. I got an unusually smoky black tea called Trans-Siberian something. It reminded me of Melanesian sweet potato cooked over the fire. I think she ordered something fruity and herbal. Then for the next couple of hours, we walked up and down Frankfort Avenue, talking and sipping our tea, interrupted every now and then by the trains that roared by on the other side of the street.
I did most of the talking, telling her story after story. I kept waiting for her to jump in. I found out later that she kept waiting for me to stop talking. I was able to pick up that she was not only a good listener but also sharp and humble. As any returned missionary will testify, a part of my soul was so refreshed that she actually wanted to hear stories of the gospel breaking through overseas.
Most importantly, she clearly had a heart to know Jesus more. We learned that we were in similar places in terms of our spiritual journey, though having approached from different directions – that place being somewhere in the intersection of missions and reformed theology and a spiritual dry patch and a desire to know more of the Holy Spirit. She told me that she had seen an emphasis on spiritual gifts abused in some of the churches she’d grown up in and that she was trying to make sense of those experiences in light of the rich theology she was encountering in class every day. She too wanted to speak more about these things but in contexts safe from the kind of theological smackdowns that could sometimes typify those conversations among students on campus.
Having survived the initial deluge of awkwardness, there were no more overpowering emotions that night. We both came away glad we had met up, intrigued, and hoping for more conversation. It seemed that at the very least, we had both found a friend we could confide in, someone else who was not interested in theology for its own sake, but because of the one it might reveal. Someone else who couldn’t help but come a little more alive when hearing some good Jesus stories.
So, we kept on talking. And the rest is history. We’ve now been married for thirteen winding and wonderful years.
It’s fun to think back on that sunny October afternoon and to tell the story of our first pseudo-date. But man, as they say in Central Asia – mud of the earth be upon my head. That fire alarm. What a way to start your first date.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 