Kate with an “e” (now w/ring pic!)

I grew up on Anne of Green Gables. On Saturdays or most anytime I was home sick from school Mom would cover our old couch with a sheet, pile up the pillows, and turn on the 8 hour saga that is Anne of Green Gables. Anne was my idol- she was spunky and smart, she loved words and longed to be a writer, and she had this fiery red hair that perfectly matched her temperament. I wanted to be her. All of my dolls had red hair. I prayed at night that somehow God would see fit to change my blond locks to red while I slept.

In only a slightly different way, I grew up on Camp Union. Out in the middle of nowhere Ohio, wedged between cornfields and hedged in by old barely two lane country roads. Instead of Saturday mornings, I spent weeks of my childhood summers there. I would wake up early before the sun while the dew was still glistening on the grass and run down the road shaped like a shepherds hook in front of the main drive. I played capture the flag, stayed up late loving the beckoning of a smoldering campfire, and spent my days learning about Jesus. Some of the sweetest times I had with the Lord as a child happened on that weathered plot of land.

The deep good parts of me that have always swooned over Anne’s love story are the very same parts of me that love getting swept up in memories of church camp. Both have a romantic pull on my heart; both feel like a pockets of my history where time ceases to exist and the curtain between what I know and what really is becomes thin enough to see through.

Last night those two worlds met in perfect harmony.

But let me back up and give you some context.

I started going to camp when I was five, but only because my Aunt Deb and Uncle Mike were the directors. I tagged along for years before I was an official camper with counterparts my own age. To the best of my remembrance, my official church camp days began around age 7 or 8. To the best of his remembrance, we were both campers the same week either when we were 8 or 9. I don’t remember the first time I saw him, but he remembers the first time he saw me. But then again, he has a memory like an elephant and I sometimes think I write so that when I do forget there will be a way to recall the things that have slipped on by. He tells me stories about sitting on the benches outside the tabernacle playing with lumps of clay and joining me on those early morning jogs. I just feel like I’ve always known him, memories aside.

We were buddies. We wrote letters. I lived in Bellefontaine. He lived in Wauseon. We didn’t go to school together. We didn’t go to youth group together. But summer after summer we’d meet on those sacred grounds to play and worship and explore what it meant to love God.

I cannot think of any other person who I have stayed connected to because of a handful of weeks, good as they may have been, in my childhood. (Geesh, I barely even keep up with high school friends!) But through the fluidity of time and waves of change, David has been a reoccurring character in the story of my life. In high school we were both over achievers, digging in to whatever we did. I spent my hours working on soil microbes in Ben Logan’s science lab. David spent his being an State FFA officer. We didn’t keep up much, but when he was around for an FFA thing, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to drop by my parents’ house to take a walk or say hello.

I went to Wright State and he went to Ohio State. Freshmen year we both were involved in Campus Crusade for Christ and both ended up at the New Years celebration in Indianapolis. Reconnecting this time through a friend of a friend, we met one morning for breakfast. David says I showed up in jammy pants. I don’t remember that, but I do remember thinking I was going to intentionally look I wasn’t trying. Hence, the pjs

This reconnection meant I made it a few times to Columbus for Joshua House and that he’d end up toilet papering with my college friend and that at least once we’d take a walk downtown Dayton so I could admire the stately old brick homes.

Like stepping on the grounds of a holiness camp fraught with memories or curling up on the couch to watch Anne be loved by Gilbert, there was always a tender, nostalgic feeling in taking a walk with David. We’ve done a lot of walking and talking over the years. I have grown accustomed to the rhythmic sound of his heavy, deliberate steps. Where I tend to walk fast and talk faster still, he has a way of intentionally strolling…

We took one such walk the day that EMI records people first came to meet Beth at my parents’. We had visited and said our hellos and then we went for a long walk down their country road, hand in hand, and discussed at length the stories of our respective families. We were both 21 and I was months away from graduating college. We had been writing letters back and forth, talking on the phone late into the night, and spending time together drinking coffee. I had taken him to my cousin Jeff’s wedding in Indiana with my family. He had taken me to a OSU football game and picnicked with his parents and brothers.

After the OSU game and the picnic on September 28, 2002 (I told you has a steel trap of a memory!) we went for a cup of coffee and talked about life… specifically, the suspicion that we both had that we’d be spending ours together.

Somehow by December of that year, the letters I was sending had a changed tone. I know because he let me read through the stack of him he’d kept all these years. I wasn’t sure I was ready to settle down as much as I wanted to have an adventure. Truth me told, underneath all of the words, I can still hear and feel how scared I was of this bold, unwavering man I had always known. I was scared of his strength and determination, especially when it came to how sure he’d always been about me.

At some point, I just quit taking his calls. So he called every day for almost three months and then he left flowers and a card on the steps of my house off of Dayton-Yellow Springs Rd in Fairborn.

I ached. I felt horrible. But the fear got the best of me. Mom had asked me sometime during the fall of 2002 if I was falling in love. I confessed that I thought I was, but I was just naive enough to think I wanted a man I who needed me.

In 2003 we met at Panera at the Tuttle Mall in Dublin and I told him over coffee that I was going to move to Seattle. David was unnaturally quiet as he sipped his coffee. I was bluntly giving “us” closure; telling him indirectly our childhood suspicions had been wrong. He says he can remember watching me get into my black sunfire and drive off. I can only remember the pit in my stomach, knowing I had hurt a life long kindred friend.

Camp Union is in the Adelsberger blood and my brother Ben has been the one who has stayed most involved. He’s on the board and spends weeks being a counselor, driving a tractor, and fixing things when they brake. At some point in the summer of 2008, he came home from camp and said, “Hey Kate- do you know someone named David Andre?” I told him I did and enquired how in the world that had come up. He told me David had stopped by during the week, wandered around for awhile and left a check to bless the camp. I off-handedly mentioned that I’d love to know what had become of David. The next weekend, Ben came home with his contact information from the check. I laughed at the thought of how stalker-ish it would be to contact him and try to explain how I’d gotten his phone number.

More than a year passed. I would have fleeting thoughts about that David of my childhood. I wondered where he lived and what he’d ended up doing with his life; if he was married and if he had children. I would think of trying to find him on facebook to say hello, but then think about that sad day at Panera and wonder if he’d even want to hear from me.

In January of 2009, I decided to friend him. He accepted but it was some time later that we traded short informational messages. I told him I was divorcing and that I had a son and that I was living back in Bellefontaine. He told me where he worked, what he did, and that he was seeing someone. I assumed we had both satisfied our curiosity over what paths each other’s lives had taken.

January of 2010 I got a message from him. It would be much later that I would connect the dots and realize he had written me in the wee early morning of his 29th birthday. It was a short message to say he hoped we were well. I didn’t respond. The next message I would receive was the day before my 29th birthday. It didn’t escape me that he’d remembered the significance of March 26. It was another hello, hope you’re well kind of message. I wrote back to let him know that we were doing good and gave him a short update.

At some point in April, I got a letter that was much less niceties and formalities and was instead straight from the guts. He spoke to those suspicions and the best shared parts of our childhood and to walks we had taken hand in hand. He wanted to be respectful of the end of my marriage and he also wanted to say some things. He had been quiet that day in Panera; he didn’t want to be silent again.

I was unsure. I was scared. I prayed about it. I agreed to exchange letters. I kept praying and at some point the Lord asked me to take 40 days. So we did. I fasted on and off, seeking the Lord about the whole thing. David fasted all 40. I had the sneaking suspicion that whether or not I’d agreed for him to visit, he’d end up at my parents some way. He always did have a mind of his own.

So after 40 days of letters and in the latter half, phone calls, David came to Bellefontaine on May 23rd. We met at 6am at my somewhat completed house. I pulled up, thinking I had beat him, only to get out of my car and see that familiar face stepping out from behind the corner of my house. He’d been there an hour before me. I was 5 minutes late. That says more about us then I’d care to admit We walked around my will-be neighborhood for hours. He’d gently tug on my arm when I started power walking. We went to breakfast. We went to church. The rest of the day was spent hanging with my family and playing with the kiddos at the park. We sat on the swings and talked. It was unbelievable and yet so natural. Though years and years had passed since we’d laid eyes on each other, it was like no time had passed. When 10p rolled around, he had to leave and I felt a knot in the pit in my stomach.

In the weeks and months that have followed, he has shown himself to be everything good I had always believed about him. He prayed for me when I was worked up or nervous or scared. He has worked tirelessly in my sauna of a house. He has spent his weekends in my town, with my friends and family, making my life easier whenever possible.

Last evening we left the house at 7p. As we drove downtown Columbus I didn’t wonder much about where we were going. David’s a planner. He’s one to have things under control so I rarely waste time wondered about what is next. When we got off on 11th, a blinking sign said “FAIR PARKING”. I commented that oh yea, the State Fair was this week. He said, “oh imagine that.. the fair”, in a slightly sarcastic way. I assumed he was giving me a hard time for not already knowing this information. I dove right into how much I hate the fair and the smell of all of that fried food. Then I said I’ve never been to the State Fair and would never want to go. “You’d never want to go, eh?” he said with a wink.

Oops, I just very strongly said I wouldn’t never want to go but here we are driving around in the same space everyone else is looking for parking. We’re going to the fair, I thought. I tried to make it better by stammering something about how my only experience with fairs is in Logan County, which is probably really ghetto comparatively. He smiled and winked at me and squeezed my hand. I laughed and quit trying to make it better.

As we drove around, I started to think the surroundings looked very familiar…but then again with my memory, who knows, I thought. He parked on a side street and we got out. He locked my purse in the trunk and we started walking. He stopped in front of a house. “Do you remember this place?” I took one look at the brick duplex and the numbers 403 and 401.

I remembered.

Nearly 8 years ago that house where he lived with a bunch of guys had served as home base on the day of the OSU football game and coffee shop and that very memorable conversation. He pointed out the roof just outside of his old window where he’d spent many evenings talking to me on the phone.

And then… he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.
And I said yes. Like, YES!

And as he slipped the absolutely breath taking diamond on my left hand, many streams of sweetness and promise came flooding together all at once.

Super hard to get a good pic (even w/David's iphone) because its so sparkly! Its a cushion cut diamond and I love it!

A year ago this summer I knelt at the alter of my church and the Lord whispered to me about Boaz and the good He had for me. My friend, Rachael, told me a week later she had been praying for me and the Lord just said “benefactor”. Webster says a benefactor is a “kindly helper”- I cannot even tell you how true that is.

I told Pastor last fall that I was terrified I’d never be able to move forward in a relationship again. I just couldn’t imagine how long it would take me to trust someone. I cried to him that I worried I would need so long to get to know someone that I’d be past the age to have more children. “It will take YEARS,” I choked out between tears…

….how about 20? The Lord knew. Today after church I showed Pastor the rock on my left ring finger and he smiled. “I love David, you know?” he said. “Kate, there’s no hiddenness or guile in him. He’s sincere and soft hearted and teachable.” Trusting David, even in the face of my history, has been second nature for just those reasons.

I grew up feasting on a love story of a boy and girl who had known each other as children. I longed to be loved the way the L.M. Montgomery depicted Gilbert loving Anne. She was a mess a good bit of the time, but he just loved her right in the middle of it. He was taken with her in a way he couldn’t shake.

David is fond of saying that I am “in his guts” or that something in him has always been rooted in something of me. A few years ago when I felt like I was just spinning my wheels I wrote a sad post about how I longed for that love story in my life. I read it again this morning for the first time since I penned it. I can so distinctly remember that aching and how I could not see any light at the end of what was a very long tunnel. And here, just a short time later, the Lord has made good on every promise… and not only that, but He has weaved the story together in just the way a storyteller like me would appreciate…

At the very place I grew up loving most, I met the very man who would be Boaz- a kindly helper and friend and protector and provision- and who would love me with the very same determined love my heart had always craved. And in a short time, the whole story is going to come full circle when we make a covenant with one another on the grounds of that holiness so aptly named Camp Union.

Anne thought her name was a little plain so she insisted it be spelled with an “e” to make it more “distinguished”. I think from now on I might just have to introduce myself as “Kate with an ‘e’ ”

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