Love Crept In

   

12 or13 years ago, my family moved back to Arkansas. Josh says we met for the first time at a mutual friend's house, but I remember meeting him at one of my sister's birthday parties. I thought our moms introduced us. He thinks that our friends did. I don't know. We met anyway, and bonded over a mutual interest in Star Wars, hiking, and in being generally more awesome that our younger siblings. He says I was the most unique kid he'd ever met, but I think I was just the first real life tomboy he'd ever met. I thought he was the weirdest and most quiet kid I ever met, and I vowed to break his shell. I guess we were just kindred spirits, because pretty quickly after we met, we became inseparable.

As we got older, our friends and families teased us about having crushes on each other, but the truth is, we really didn't. Josh and I were just such good friends that nobody could think of anything else to call it! He was my other half before I knew what an "other half" really was. We were for real, 100%, best friends, but just friends. I loved Josh more than any person I'd ever met, and he loved me, but it was not the kind of love that you take on a date. It was the kind of love that builds forever friends.

Josh and I rode out the crazy storms of adolescence together...you know, those years where everything's a disaster. We were in youth group together. We went to karate together. We went on long trips together. Really, we did everything together, and the older we got, the worse it got. Everybody knew that Josh and Laura pretty much came together.  So, I guess it was pretty weird to the rest of the world that we weren't "in love." Looking back, there wasn't a boy in the world who stood a chance against my best friend. Even if I had dated someone else, it couldn't have lasted...because Josh was Josh. Nobody could beat the friendship that we had.

Our friendship plodded along pretty much uninterrupted and carefree throughout high school. I don't remember when things changed really, but one day during the spring before he left for college, he asked if I would be his girlfriend. I said yes.  2 years later, he showed up at my door at the crack of dawn and asked me to be his wife, and I said yes again. A year after that, I wore a pretty white dress. He wore a suit and tie.  With almost everyone there that we'd ever known, we confirmed the suspicions our friends and family had long ago developed. We were, in fact, in love. We weren't "just friends," but more than friends, and we made the friendship permanent.


Sometimes love doesn't swoop in and take you by surprise. You don't have to know how it changed or when it did. All that matters is that it did change, and that love did find its way in. My favorite author, L.M. Montgomery once said:

“Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.” 

That's how love found us.  It crept in quietly. It unfolded through a beautiful friendship. It sneaked up on us, and turned childhood friends into sweethearts. That's our story up till now, but it's still just being written!

Happy Anniversary best friend!