Christy and Sam: The Love story - Part 2

If you haven't read part 1 click here so you can get caught up! Ok, now you may continue on. :)

We fell in "like"

Both of us can barely remember when we started liking each other. "It has been coming on so gradually, I hardly know when it began! But I believe I must date it from my first hearing him sing and play the guitar." ;) (Fans of Pride and Prejudice will get that quote, Sam is my Mr. Darcy! And my Shikamaru, oh and my Luke Danes as I've recently been realizing.) But seriously, it probably first started when he went to visit his family in Africa for the holidays in November of 2009. 

We had been working closely together for several months and when he left... I realized pretty quickly that I missed him... like... a lot. He was gone all of November and December. During that time I noticed he was a big reason why interning had been so fun. While he was gone a fellow Tejas SMT and I drew this picture of Sam.

We had way too much fun

Yep, definitely missed him. I confided this information to my mom. I also remember telling her that I felt like I would want to give him a hug when he got back, but I had never given him a hug before... would it be weird? At that point I still thought of him as just a good friend, nothing more. I believe my mom began to suspect a greater attachment than I knew myself. Sam got back at the beginning of the year during our Summer Ministry Team reunion party. There was a bunch of people around him when I said hi and he didn't seem overly excited to see me, so I decided on no hug. (I commented on him barely acknowledging me when he got back much later on and he said he was jet lagged and really out of it and doesn't even remember me saying hi)

The intern buddies!

During the spring internship there were only 3 of us, me, Sam and Beau(our good friend to this day, thanks for being our wing man dude!). Also, I was training to become a full time employee at Camp Tejas. I started working more in the office, but I still was doing some intern stuff with the guys too. During the fall internship we barely spent any of our off time together, not sure why. So why did we become good friends in the spring? Well, here are some of the reasons why.

While I was on Christmas break I purchased myself a nice, big TV, because well, I love movies and video games. :D So one day I suggested we start a weekly dinner/movie night where I would cook the guys dinner and then we would watch a movie or play a video game. We had some good times! We would watch the credits of the movie all the way to the end just to find people with funny names and laugh at them. Sam made us dinner once. Chicken Fried Steak and Mashed Potatoes and it was delicious. I literally kicked Sam off the couch one day during a spirited game of Super Mario Bros. Wii. I also specifically remember a zombie game of ping pong where I laughed the most probably in my life. 

He's cuddling a tiny puppy!!
You can see some of the mats we were cleaning in the background

After each retreat weekend we would do a thorough cleaning of the dining hall. One of the tasks was to spray out and wash the kitchen floor mats. It took two people and most people didn't like to do it. It took a couple hours and it was messy, wet and a lot of times pretty cold outside. But just about every weekend Sam and I would volunteer and do the task together and talk the whole time. We got to know a lot about each other during those times. He called me the golden child and I called him a rebel. Opposites attract right?

Every month the full time staff and interns would have a potluck. After each potluck we would all stick around the dining hall for a while. Sam would play his guitar and sometimes sing for us, while Beau and I would do puzzles.

I have no idea what we were saying.

After one of the potlucks, my boss asked, "Soooo... you and Sam huh?" I said, "What?? Why would you say that?" He said, "I guess because y'all looked all nice and dressed up sitting next to each other last night." (dressed up, meaning wearing something different than a camp shirt and shorts.) I responded. "There's nothing going on, we're just good friends." That was the truth! I promise. Like I said earlier I was not thinking of guys romantically at all.

Taking pictures of each other :)

He's cute

Sometime in February the interns had a few days off together. We took a trip back to my parents house. We played some old atari video games, watched some late night winter olympics(curling to be exact) and went horseback riding. We also all bought toms and wrote Camp Tejas Interns on the back. (Also, I haven't mentioned that my parents were less than thrilled about my first boyfriend, but when my dad met Sam for the first time he burned him an Eagles CD. :D) Sam and I talked the whole way to Kingwood and back. My mom and my dad were not fooled. They knew we liked each other before I even realized it. I was talking to my mom soon after the trip and she commented saying, "Sooo, you and Sam seem pretty close." I said, "Really? You think so?"

The intern toms

Yeah... we're cool. 

Later that month it was Sam's birthday and it snowed. (Bah! Just realized a Gilmore Girls reference here. It's magical when it snows!...and I just got asked by Netflix if I was still watching Gilmore Girls...) We had a snowball fight and made tiny snowmen together. We watched the Wizard of Oz that night. I think it was right around then I finally realized... I think I like Sam... more than a friend. When/how did that happen?? I had been praying for a while for a kindred spirit who lived close to me. I never expected it to be Sam. Sam was talking about me to his mom and she said "Sounds like you found a kindred spirit." There was a time when he would count how many times I shook my head at him and I would count how many times he rolled his eyes at me. And I tried hard to think of inventive ways to get him to say the word cute because he said it wasn't part of his vocabulary. We would even chat on Facebook at night after we had worked together all day... Yeah, there was no avoiding the truth, I was falling for him.

Snowball target!

I don't think I've ever seen flakes so big!

Still one of my favorite pictures of us

I think I only told my mom and my covenant partner at Tejas, Kristi, about my attachment. I remember Kristi commenting and said she had been thinking, "I wonder why Sam has been so happy lately, maybe he's in love with Christy!" I wouldn't let myself believe that because I didn't want to be disappointed if it wasn't true.

During a retreat weekend in early March 2010, Sam, unbeknownst to me, asked for advice from two of our mutual friends that worked the weekend with us, about telling me about his feelings. One of them said "Go for it man, Christy doesn't act like that with anyone else." Sam asked our other friend if she was sure I was over my previous relationship. Once she assured him I was, his mind was made up. He was going to tell me how he felt.

It was Sunday March 7th, 2010 (Here's where every guy is like, "How do women remember these details??") Normally Sam, Beau and I would drive to church in the evening and have some fast food together after. (There was a backflipping burrito one night) Well, Beau had gone home for his next couple of days off. So it was just me and Sam. After church I asked Sam, "Do you still want to get some fast food?" He said something like, "Yeah, we always do don't we?" We went to Whataburger and the whole time we were eating Sam was jittery, didn't say much and didn't even finish his burger. I thought, "He's acting weird... OH! Maybe he does like me and is going to tell me!" He didn't end up saying anything, so we started driving back to Camp. I thought, "I was being silly, I guess he doesn't like me." Then out of nowhere while I was driving down the highway he says, "Ok, here's how it's going to go down, we're going to have an adult conversation." (He knew he needed to clarify this because he wanted to be certain I knew he was serious since we joked around a lot) I said, "Uh... Ok." He continued with, "I think you know what I'm going to tell you. It's pretty obvious.... I've become quite fond of you and I kinda need to know if you feel the same way." I said, "OH!...." I paused and didn't say anything for probably what seemed like an eternity to Sam. I think he said something like, "Well...?" I said, "I don't know..." Still very cool and collected Sam said, "Alright, that's fine." I snapped out of my indecisiveness because I really knew how I felt. I said, "No, I mean I do. I do like you." I think he responded with, "Cool." 

To be concluded...

Proverbs 18:24
A man of too many friends comes to ruin,
But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Christy and Sam: The Love Story - Part 1

I wanted to take a break from writing about the kids for a couple of posts and go back to the very beginning of our family and tell the story of how Sam and I fell in love. There would be no Jane and Atlas without Christy and Sam (and God of course.) I haven't really written out our love story. I would really love to put it down on paper or digital paper at least to remember and read it for myself. I hope you enjoy it too.

We met

I decided to work at Camp Tejas, a Christian summer camp/retreat center, the summer of 2008. I had been going to Camp Tejas for a weekend every summer since I was 3. I always thought of it as my fun place not a work place. So the decision to work at Tejas was definitely a God thing. At that point of my life I was very fearful of anything new and working at a summer camp where everything I would be doing would be new, including the place I would live, was way out of my comfort zone. I felt strongly that God told me, "Some things will be hard, other things will be easy, but it will all be good!" That gave me the courage to go work at Camp Tejas and be assured that it was going to be good for me even if there was a lot of learning and difficult things that came along with it.

Sam had recently moved back to the US after being a missionary kid in Kenya for 6 years. He had gone to college for a semester or so and decided it wasn't for him. His parents were still missionaries in Kenya, so he didn't exactly have anywhere to go for the summer. Someone he met when he lived in Kenya was now working at Camp Tejas full time and told him it would be a great place to work and live for the summer. He decided sure, why not.

The day we met and our first picture together! (Look for the non-green shirts)

So we met in May of 2008 when we were both 19, but other than maybe a couple of small, pretty much meaningless, conversations (because neither of us can remember them) and becoming Facebook friends, we barely noticed each other. I always thought Sam was funny and Sam always thought I was pretty, but nothing even close to love at first sight. (which neither of us believe in anyway) We both a great time working at Tejas, but totally missed out on getting to know each other that summer. That was about it for our first summer of working together. Very uneventful. We were both distracted by other people that summer, but nothing came of it.

Summer Camp season ended in August and we went back to our regular lives. I went back home to my parent's house and worked as shelving clerk at my local library (a job I still look back on with fondness, maybe one day I will get to work at a library again.) Sam went to Dallas (his hometown) and lived with his older brother.

We became friends

I wasn't sure if I was going back to Tejas to work the summer of 2009. I loved my library job and it was a job that I interviewed twice for and was hard to get. If I left now I probably wouldn't get to work at a library again for a long time, if at all. I got a call from my boss at Tejas asking me to come back as a supervisor for the 2009 summer. After much thought and prayer I decided Tejas was more important to me than my library job. 

Sam began to feel like the life he had been living in Dallas didn't have a future and wasn't very meaningful. He started working at Tejas again in March during the retreat season as an intern and continued to work for the summer of 2009.

Working together and starting to be friends

So here we were back together again at Tejas and now I was Sam's boss. :D During the 2008 summer I was a regular SMT(Summer Ministry Team worker) and I worked as a lifeguard and in recreation, Sam was a Team Leader and mostly worked in the kitchen and and some recreation. So he was an expert in the kitchen and I was supposed to supervise the kitchen now with never having worked in it before... I was very intimidated. I worked in the kitchen on a few retreats before the summer started and because Sam was there as an intern I learned from him and he taught me the ways of the kitchen. The first week of the summer I was assigned to supervise the kitchen, Sam and his team were assigned to work the kitchen along with another team. Their team colors were Green and Purple. We called ourselves team Barney. :) The Food Service manager of the camp said we were the best combination of people to work the kitchen. All of us loved working together. You can tell!

Good times!!

Green and Purple teams, AKA Team Barney!!

Sam was so nice to me during that time. He kept me sane with his knowledge of the kitchen and random funniness. But I still didn't think of him in a romantic way at all. He was just a friend. He felt the same way about me. It had taken us a year after we met to become friends, but it finally happened!

Working the top of the wall together

The summer of 2009 was one of the greatest times of my life. Such an awesome group of people. So much fun was had! Many friends were made that I still have to this day. I thought to myself why would I want to leave?? I didn't have a job or school to go back to, so why not!? So I decided to be an intern during the retreat season. Sam didn't have anything that he would rather do at the time, so he stayed on as an intern after the summer as well.

Being an intern during retreat season is pretty different than working the summer. During the summer you are working with about 60+ other people split up into about 10 teams, all rotating jobs through the summer. There is only one team during retreat season, the interns. There were 5 of us in the fall and we worked all the jobs and we did it together. You basically have no choice, but to get to know each other pretty well.

Remodeling a conference room

One thing got in the way of me thinking of Sam as anything other than a friend at the beginning of our internship was that I had my first boyfriend right after the summer of 2009 was over. He had worked at the Camp the last two summers as well. It didn't last long. After about a month we realized we weren't right for each other and broke up. It took me a couple months to feel over it. Not because I was heart broken or wanted to get back together or anything, but because it felt like such a failure to me. I guess I really wanted/expected my first relationship to be the one that worked. I was not one to rush into a relationship or did I think lightly of it. I mean I was 20 before I had my first boyfriend. God was good to protect me and kept my heart fully in tact.

God sees me, God knows me, God loves me.

One day, I read some passages that reminded me that God wanted to romance me. Specifically Zephaniah 3:17. As soon as I finished reading, I looked down and there was a beautiful lone flower right in front of me. I needed that. I thought "Ok God, I hear you. I will focus on you." That was just the beginning of many beautiful flowers and sunsets that I felt were meant for me. I had always wanted to get married, but I at times I had let it become more important than my relationship with God.

SOOO many beautiful sunsets.

Once I saw the break up as helping me understand better what I wanted/needed in a guy and that it allowed me to deepen my relationship with God, I didn't see it as a failure anymore and was able to move on completely. Now refocused with God as my most important relationship, I didn't even feel the need to look at guys in a romantic way at all. I thought, "This will be the year of no boyfriends and not even any "crushes". I'm not going to let guys distract me! I mean there's only two guys my age here and I know I won't date either of them. They're my friends and that's all." God's like "Ok, now let me surprise you!"

Random beaver we found under a dock and named Doug

No one can convince me that God doesn't have a sense of humor. I remember there was this one time while I was still dating my first boyfriend, the interns and some weekend workers were sitting in the dinning hall talking after dinner. I was texting my boyfriend and he asked what we were doing. I texted "Oh Sam is just making everyone laugh like always." He responded with "Don't let him steal your heart!" I said "Haha! Very funny! You don't have to worry about that." Little did I know...

To be continued...

Zephaniah 3:17
The Lord your God in your midst,
 The Mighty One will save; 
He will rejoice over you with gladness, 
He will quiet you with his love, 
He will rejoice over you with singing.