meet my cousin's husband's brother

On one unsuspecting summer day back in July of 1993 I met a most amazing man. He was a young man in college studying to be a Food Scientist at Purdue University. I was a new doctor in the chiropractic field, a Palmer graduate.

He had not graduated yet. He was in the throws of his education at Purdue; I was a Jersey girl living in Iowa and practicing in Illinois. The last thought on his mind was a long-distance relationship. The first thought on my mind was, "I wonder who God has for me" back in those days and I certainly didn't think it was a college student from Indiana. I wasn't expecting to meet anyone that day.

All I expected was to have a fun-filled weekend with Jill and her family. You see, Jill is the cousin I grew up seeing on rare occasions when she came to visit New Jersey with her mom and some siblings. When I was in my teens I would go to family reunions in that far-off place called Indiana that was so unfamiliar to me. I grew up in an apartment in a one square mile town called Hoboken. She grew up with corn fields all around her. We said words like "water" and "coffee" with completely different dialects. Mine sounded more like "cauffee" and "wauta" and hers was, well, Midwestern sounding. She had beautiful, long blonde hair and smelled so pretty. She was like a big sister to me that loved me unconditionally. I have 4 wonderful big sisters and she would be the 5th. I truly looked up to her.

On that particular day, God must have whispered something in her ear very unexpectedly. He must have given her a boldness to ask her husband's brother to stick around because her cousin, me, would be pulling up after a long drive from Iowa and she wanted him to meet me. She must have liked playing cupid.   

And if you want to hear more about my love story, you'll have to stay tuned this week. It's the perfect story for the week of Valentine's day, wouldn't ya say?

Oh, what a catch!