#24

#24 When I was twenty.one I fell in love for the first time. His name was Ben. He was beautiful. smart. creative. talented. and completely wrong for me. But, man, I love(d) him. We still keep up from time to time. He's still smart. still creative. still talented. still beautiful. and still competely wrong for me. He called me, "Mary-Liz" and I loved that.

He encouraged me during my time at Longwood and wrote me some of the most beautiful emails/letters.

These are just a few...




One of the coolest gifts I've ever recieved was from him. I was scared to death to move away. He made me a cd-he knew I fell asleep to music each night. It wasn't just any cd though. It was him talking to me..he'd kept a journal and he read pages of it to me. The pages that he read were the ones that he'd written when he first met me, the first time he said, "I love you" and so on. At the end of the cd there was a song by Bach, "Sleepers Awake." After the song finished he said, "I want to take pictures of our lives and hand them to people to show them just how beautiful it can be." *sigh* It got me through some lonely nights. I still have it to this day in my "Ben box."

It was all very dramatic. We were young. We were optimistic. We were certain we'd be married.

After (almost) two years we didn't work out. The problem? He had wounds too deep for me to fix. And me? Well, I didn't leave room for Jesus.


He lives in Kansas now. Blah. Too cold. Too flat. Too blah.


Thank you, Jesus for the opportunity AND for letting it pass... ;)