Reminders of Love

Today has been a wonderful day ... and I know that I should be asleep. I lead worship with the praise band tomorrow morning - and it will come whether I'm sleeping or not! So far, I'm not.

I was looking for some papers tonight (didn't find them ... sigh) but discovered some other treasures. THIS is why I'm a packrat. Things that bring back memories to me - are treasures and will never find their way into the trash. Max and I were discussing just a little bit ago the best way to deal with our memories. You see, I want to be mobile within 10 years. So, I have a lot of 'stuff' to deal with, the least of which is all of our photographs, Max's negatives, and the clippings from several lifetimes of experiences.

We figure that we will need at least (at least? yikes!) 2 Terabytes of storage to deal with everything we want to save. My plan is to scan all of my photographs and begin burning multiple sets of DVDs, while also saving them to a hard drive - and we'll back those hard drives up. I want to toss out the photos - or give them to Carol or Jim. Anything to make them leave my personal space.

We just bought a brand new scanner - it's better than anything I ever had at Insty-Prints. It will scan all of Max's negatives - 35mm, 120mm and 4x5. Pretty awesome in our world. And it's going to be terrific at scanning all of my stuff. We just have to get busy doing it.

Well ... that was a long introduction to one of the treasures I discovered this evening.

Max and I met online, January 6 1994. I just discovered an email that I had printed out from him, January 28, 1994. He's quite pragmatic in this email, but here's why I ended up marrying him:

"...we have been talking serious about what kind of marriage we envision ... I am getting the feeling that this is not some mere fantasy infatuation - I feel the Lord in His wisdom is pointing the way for us. It is for us to see if this is part of his plan or not. But, providence has a way of being inevitable. I have been thinking that perhaps you are the reason God brought me to North Carolina, which eventually led me to meeting Jay and using his computer to meet you. I have prayed for help in the past 6 months for God to help me finally find a woman who is truly right and good for me, by whatever means He chooses to do so. I can't help but think my prayers are being answered."

What's a girl to think when she reads words like this from a man that had been exciting my mind night after night when we spoke online or on the telephone. I wasn't quite ready to meet him at that point. It would take another month and a half for Max to get past all my fears ... but, Max never let me forget that God was working on both of us to bring us together. His confidence in that fact gave me a lot of strength!

The rest of the letter from Max is pretty cool ... he's thinking out loud (on paper) about how to deal with all of the logistics of his life.

I didn't save a lot of the emails and conversations that we had - though they were on the computer. This is one that I printed out ... thank heavens. It definitely reminds me that our love came from a source other than ourselves.