Gun Nuts Media

This post has nothing to do with guns, politics, or anything along those lines.  It’s a much more personal post, which isn’t something I do often.  If you’re interested 3 years ago today, I was standing in a little church in Crawfordsville, Indiana.  My Hoosier readers will probably recognize that location as being somewhere in between BFE and Indianapolis.  That day I made what was probably the smartest decision of my life – I said “I do” to the woman I loved then, and love today.  We’ve been married for 3 years now, and while it hasn’t always been the easy path, I wouldn’t have picked any other path.

But that’s not really where the story begins, because it started before that, in West Lafayette – home of the Purdue Boilermakers, and a young man at a crossroads.  I was getting ready to wrap up my collegiate career, and had come out of a bad relationship, which had led to a rebound into several…physical interactions with various ladies, none of which were serious.  But there was this one girl, a friend of my roommate.  We’d hang out with this girl a lot, because she played pool, and we all played a lot of pool together.  Of course, she had a boyfriend – and a boyfriend who as Air Force basic at that.  I couldn’t violate guy law, and especially “military rules” and steal a dude’s girl while he was off at basic training.  That’s just not cool.

Now, some things happened…and I ended up falling for this girl.  I’m not really sure how it happened, either.  I just know that one day I looked at her, and I realized that I was falling for her.  Now, that was not in the plan.  “The Plan” was to take my new awesome education, and go directly to OCS, do not pass go, do not collect $200.  Life has a funny way of changing things though.

I never did go to OCS.  I moved to Virginia to be with the girl, and we got a little apartment in Reston, where we really started to build something special from our college fling.  Then for some crazy reason, I decided to ask her to marry me – so standing next to the fountain in the Reston Town Centre, I got down on one knee and said “will you marry me”?  Lucky for me, she took pity on me and said yes.  A little under a year later, I was standing in a church in Indiana, looking at this girl, this girl that wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.

She doesn’t know this, but I cried just a little bit on that day.  I’m not a very emotionally expressive guy, but when I came in to the sanctuary, and saw her standing there wearing white – for just a second, I cried.  Not out of sadness, but out of a sense of joy and completion.  I’d spent the better part of my life up to that point looking for something that would make me feel balanced, feel “right”.  I’d looked in a lot of wrong places, and then finally when I wasn’t even looking, I found it.

Thank you for 3 great years, Lindsey.  Here’s to another 60 or so.  I love you.