This is either a love story or a cautionary tale

The Crouch Chronicles: Part 1

I have wanted to write about the story of Christian and me for a long time. Years ago I began to write it all down, but at the time we’d only been married a few years. It’s coming up on 16 years now, and while I’m sure there are many more exhilarating tales that others have told, as I have begun to reconstruct the timeline of our relationship, I have been struck once again at how unlikely it was for the two of us to find each other. Apart from the work of a sovereign God, it never would have happened. And yet it did, almost as if each of us were magnets that for the first 20 years of our life were too far away from the other for there to be any pull. And then, in 2006, they were each nudged just close enough together for the pairing to be unavoidable, and, once together, very difficult to pull apart.

Once we met and talked about our future together, I don’t remember any reservations. We didn’t break up or put our relationship on pause. Even when Christian traveled to another continent …