| In September 1994, my family traveled from Rock Springs, Wyoming to
Keystone, Colorado, for our church's annual celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. I had been
quite disappointed in the romance department since moving to Wyoming; my boyfriend from Oregon and
I had broken up before I moved, a guy I had always been interested in had completely flaked on me,
and the dating situation at school and church was dim.
I wasn't in the practice of praying about future relationships, so it was somewhat haltingly that
I snuggled more deeply under the covers one night and whispered a request that I might meet someone
with whom I could really talk and relate, even if it didn't turn out to be a romance. I was feeling
really lonely for the first time in my life, and none of the friends I had made at school seemed to
fill that emptiness.
I was a little sad, then, to realize after a few days in Keystone that it wasn't really a good place to meet other people my age. Most of the brethren that I met were older than my parents. Still, my sister and I decided to make the best of it by volunteering to open the heavy meeting hall doors for people that arrived each morning. We got a lot of greetings and smiles, but we saw very few eligible young men. Oh, well, I thought, and resigned myself to not meeting anyone. By half of the way through an 8-day Feast of Tabernacles, I had managed to hit it off with a guy who was several years older than I, but who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, where my family had lived many years before. With a feeling of striking while the iron was hot, I agreed to meet him at the big family dance. My family arrived at the dance, and my parents prommptly left, as the music was so loud that it was giving me a headache, and I'm far more tolerant about these things. My sister and I begged to stay, as we had both agreed to meet people there, so my parents said they would come pick us up whenever we called. The guy was an hour late, and I was passing the time nibbling on the free crackers and cheese and being grumpy that they were charging for drinks. I was looking anxiously at the door when I felt a polite tap on my shoulder and turned to see a quite attractive, dark-haired guy smiling at me. Despite the much-too-loud music, he asked me to dance, and I figured, why not? His name, he said, was Chris, and he was an excellent dancer. We had to almost shout to be heard, but he asked how old I was. I told him I was seventeen, and mentally snapped my fingers in disappointment when he said he was twenty-two. Then he said that he lived in Indiana. Strike number two, I thought. I had been burned not too long ago by a long-distance romance, and I wasn't anxious to try that again. Just then the guy I had arranged to meet arrived, and we danced a couple of times. After not long, though, my head was beginning to pound from the noise. Chris had asked me to dance a few more times, but I was trying to give him the polite brush-off when I asked the other guy to walk with me outside. Imagine my chagrin, then, when Chris said he thought he would come outside, too, and get some fresh air. I should have been in heaven, with not one but two guys seemingly smitten with my charms. Unfortunately, they almost immediately started that unconscious guy-rivalry thing, with each one having to top the other one's story. After a couple of laps around an artificial lake, I was freezing. My sister was ready to leave, so we called my parents, who obligingly showed up to take us back to the hotel. The last thing my two new guy friends said was that they would wait for me the next day at the gondola ride up the mountain. Great, I thought, just great. What was I going to do with two of them chaperoning me around the mountain? I figured that God was probably tired of hearing me whine about not having any friends or a boyfriend, but I figured that I'd give it one more shot. After my sister was asleep, I whispered very quietly into my pillow. "God, you did it for Isaac. Please, if I am supposed to be more interested in one of these guys than the other, let him be the first one I see tomorrow." The next morning was one of extreme anxiety on my part, which wasn't helped by the fact that my sister kept asking me why I had been so rude to Chris the night before. I was so sure that my prayer would be answered at the gondola ride, but everything kept going wrong. We were late starting. My dad didn't want to go. Then he got lost, and he had just said that if he didn't find the turn-off in the next five minutes that we would leave. Miracle of miracles, there was the turn-off, and we were there. Somehow, I wasn't all that surprised to see Chris waiting. I'll never know for positive, but I am 99 percent sure that he was the answer to my whispered prayer. I knew that good things were happening when he not only talked to my dad while waiting in line, but even joked with him. As we rode the gondola up the side of the mountain, Chris confessed that he had been waiting there for almost two hours, ever since the ride had opened. |