How Jason and I Met
It
was a hot day during the second week of my first year at Carleton
University, September 2002. I was sitting in a park amidst hundreds
of other university students at a beach day. Across the way, a banner
boasted "free pop" and there was a sign for Campus Crusade
for Christ, the University's Christian club. Curious, I got up and
marched across the volleyball courts to get my free pop and information
about the club. At that table were standing 4 blonde guys (one of
which was Jason, as I found out later).
Somewhere in the midst of the whirlwind of getting used to my new life away at University, and becoming deeply connected to the Christians at the Crusade group, I decided that I really wanted to sing on the worship team that they had at each of their weekly meetings. I had never sang on a worship team and the thought kind of scared me, but I wanted to try something new. By "coincidence," leading this worship team with his voice, guitar, and heart, was none other than a certain dutch man. Over that next month as Jason was leading us in worship, I found that there was something about him that I really respected and certainly admired. Because of his aloof and quiet character, (opposite from my loud and extraverted character) I spent more time getting to know other friends at Crusade whose personalities were more like mine. But there was always something about his constant and stable devotion for God, his servant-leadership, and his helpful nature that I could not help but be drawn to.
At the end of September, in driving up to a weekend retreat for all of the Campus Crusade groups, I was talking to the girls in my car about what we wanted our future husbands to be like. At that point I still had no real knowledge of who Jason was, and I had always been attracted to personalities like my own, but yet…I remember saying "I think I want to marry someone like Jason." Knowing my tendency to be ruled by emotions and my spontaneous adventurous ways, there was something about Jason's solid, trustworthy, honest, and genuine nature that drew me to him. But of course, at this point, we still had not really connected to each other.
Over the next months Jason and I got to know each other more from a distance and through group events, and soon found many of our interests to be the same. We loved soccer and running and started to go together. We also both loved to worship and began worshipping God together, going on walks, and hanging out at our campus green house. And somewhere, in the midst of that, my heart was singing and I knew I had feelings for him as more than just friends. But of course, him being the aloof and hard to read kind, I had no idea what his thoughts of me were and assumed that he had no interest in me whatsoever. At the same time, I was finally learning how to be filled completely by the love of God and the thought of introducing a man into that was intimidating. "I don’t need any guy to complete me, so I can’t have feelings for him!" were my thoughts towards the matter.
Nevertheless, after Christmas time it started to become clear that we needed to question what our relationship was. Late night MSN conversations, walks, and phone conversations were more and more frequent, but we had yet to talk about the future together. At that point we both stopped and stepped back. We spent a lot of time in prayer and alone with God to discern if it was in His will to move forward with our relationship. Since neither of us had much relationship experience and were not that interested in dating just for the sake of being with someone, we really wanted to examine if we were ready to intentionally court.
And of course, by March 11th, we had spent all the time we needed to get our hearts ready, had talked about what the intentions of our relationship would be, and Jason had asked my Dad's permission (by e-mail) to court me. We talked to both sets of parents to have their blessing and both of us spent time with each others' families, to get to know them better. We also met with our pastor to discuss our intentions about the future just to be kept accountable and to be open and transparent with others. Everyone blessed the relationship and we were very excited to be seen as a couple for the first time.