Our arrival in Cambodia was fairly shocking. It was 1997 (was that really 10 years ago?), so it was pre 9/11 and tight airport security.
Soldiers walking around the airport carrying large automatic weapons was a strange sight. I was told they were ak-47’s. There were also soldiers posted on several streetcorners, and guarding a few compounds.
My fear was gone by this point, and the soldiers added to the feeling of adventure. We all crammed into a few tiny vans, and immediately thanked the person who had invented deodorant.
It was really hot, and we were really crammed. And a few people’s deodorant had unfortunately failed them.
The streets were terrible, unpaved and potted so badly that we would bounce up and hit our heads on the top of the van. Plus, the drivers seemed a bit crazy. They relied more on their horns than on any laws we could figure out. And we all were shocked at the motorcycles and mopeds zipping around carrying entire families, loads of chickens, even baskets upon baskets of fresh bread.
And one of the American workers who lived in Cambodia zoomed by on the back of one that was used as a taxi.
And she was riding sidesaddle.
Holding onto nothing with her hands calmly folded in her lap.
Two years later, I would find myself in the same position, sitting two or three people on a moped, hoping the driver didn’t hit a pothole and bounce me right off the back. But at that point we had so many people on the team that we traveled in vans and SUV’s.
The first few days of our trip were set aside for sightseeing. We visited outdoor markets, where women squatted on tables and hacked the heads off chickens to give you fresh meat.
And they sold some sort of cockroach-looking bugs in large baskets as snacks.
About three or four days into the trip we took a tour of the Royal Palace. The wealth of it was staggering after the poverty outside the gates.
The rainy season was beginning, and being from California, I hadn’t ever experienced the huge thunderstorms that could happen in Cambodia. Even inside the palace and the temples we could feel the thunder shaking the walls.
And then, one of the older men who was with the team turned to his wife and murmured in her ear, “I was in Vietnam. And that wasn’t thunder.” I looked around, but I was the only person who had heard them, and we all continued with the tour, until we were greeted by a strange sight.
A group of Japanese business men, all in their staid black suits were leaving the temple. But they didn’t stop to put their shoes on.
They ran barefoot for the exit.
The summer after our junior year of college was busy for Isaac and I. He spent four weeks on a ship with the Navy, and shortly after he returned I was heading to Cambodia to teach English with a team of 30 college students and a few adults.
I had met everyone on the team at an orientation. Most of them were from Oklahoma, and I think there were only two of us who didn’t know anyone else on the team. I was the youngest person on the team at 19.
I had some strange dreams before leaving. In one, I was hiding behind a broken wall of some sort with some children. War raged all around us, and I was trying to protect the kids and get them away from the fighting.
Despite the dream, I wasn’t scared. I was so excited.
Until I got to the airport.
A bunch of people came out to the airport to see me off, but the trip that I had been excited about for months was suddenly terrifying to me.
If someone had pulled me aside and said, “You know, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” I probably would have gotten in my car and gone home, despite the two thousand dollars I had raised to go.
Instead my BSU director pulled me aside and said that he thought that God was allowing me to feel the fear at that time for a reason. That later, I would be able to be calm and clear-headed when it was necessary.
It wasn’t all that reassuring at the time, but he let me cry on his shoulder, which helped some.
But he turned out to be right.
My junior year, I used to have friends from BSU over every Thursday night to watch Friends and ER.
Back when ER was still good.
But Isaac and I went to the Navy Ball with his roommate Dude, and Dude’s girlfriend Joy. And we had fun.
And JT reacted to that.
He was still my next-door-neighbor and he caused me so many problems that my friends and I started going to Isaac’s apartment every Thursday night. And Isaac and I found ourselves spending time together.
We went to the grocery store to buy ice cream and soda for all the people who came over on Thursdays.
He drove with me through LA to find a guitar shop that sold a certain kind of string.
And one day when Dude and Joy mentioned that they were taking a ballroom dance class the next semester, I said that it sounded like so much fun, and I wished that I could take it, too.
And everyone turned and looked at Isaac expectantly.
And I was completely embarassed in front of him for a second time.
But he still said he’d take it with me.
When I first met Isaac, I thought he had no personality.
I did think he was cute, though.
Over the next two years I discovered that he did, indeed have a personality, although he was quite shy.
But get some caffeine and sugar into that boy, and he was pretty fun.
My junior year of college I was committed to learning about God and developing my relationship with Him. I was dealing with the fallout of ending my two-year relationship with JT and was determined not to get involved with another guy.
I was in a Bible study about missions, having become interested in possibly being a summer missionary. I was also on a ministry team, which were teams of students who led Bible studies and worked with other students.
And Isaac was in both with me. He had been to an Eastern European country the summer before. And being around him made me realize that he was pretty good guy. He cared less for appearances and more for the truth, which said a lot to me at the time. And his mom had recently moved into the state, and he was working on trying to build a relationship with her, since she had been an alcoholic most of his life, which also said a lot about his character.
And one night at dinner with a friend, I casually mentioned that I thought he was a pretty good guy.
The Navy Ball is in November every year, and Isaac was ROTC in college. He needed a date, and decided he’d ask a friend from BSU.
Out of the girls he knew there, he had been spending the most time with me since we were both in some of the same activities. Plus, I was also friends with one of his roommates and had spent some time at their apartment in my effort to stay far, far away from mine.
So he asked me.
And that night was the first night I was afraid that JT would actually physically hurt me.
But I said yes because, really, I didn’t need an excuse to go shopping and buy a new dress and do my make-up and have some fun.
I still love that aspect of the Navy Ball, 10 years later.
But the gossip started flying around us.
Did he like me? Was that why he’d asked me? Did I like him? Was it a date? Was it just friends?
The friend to whom I’d mentioned that Isaac was pretty cool, mentioned to one other girl that she thought maybe I liked Isaac. And it got around.
And one night I got a call from Isaac. He wanted to clarify that we were just friends. There was nothing more on his part. And I said that while I did think he was a great guy, I had no interest in dating anyone, so that was fine by me.
And I tried to play it off like I wasn’t completely, utterly embarassed.
*Thanks to Leah for asking me about my husband in my Q&A!
The biggest factor that led to the final break-up with JT was other girls.
But not all those other girls that he broke up with me for, or compared me to.
No, it was the Christian girls that I finally got to know. My sophomore year I asserted some independence (finally!) and stopped going to church in Hollywood, and continued going with some of the girls I had become friends with over the summer.
Really getting to know other Christian girls was instrumental in changing me and helping me to see that there was more to being a Christian than believing that there was a God, or just wanting to go to heaven.
They actually had a relationship with God. They read their Bibles and prayed regularly, and looked for ways to apply what they read to their lives. And they included me in their lives, whether it was going out to dinner or taking a roadtrip to a Christian conference.
And there were some things that they believed the Bible said were wrong. Things that JT had told me weren’t wrong.
But I learned. And I read. And I believed.
And in the summer after my sophomore year I was at a conference and I realized.
My relationship with JT was not godly. And I wanted to be a godly person.
And so, for the first time, I broke up with him.
But me breaking up with him wasn’t quite the end of things.
I thought it was great that we could remain friends, especially since I had been stupid enough to allow my roommate and her boyfriend to talk me into living next door to him.
We still spent quite a bit of time together, and what I didn’t realize was that he just expected us to get back together. He really thought that we were going to get married after we graduated, and just thought of all those other girls as little adventures along the way. He had never noticed that while he had talked about marriage over the years, I hadn’t.
And when he finally realized that it wasn’t happening, then things got ugly.
His moods swung wildly. There were rages where he would curse and yell and slam doors and I’d be afraid he would actually hurt me. There were times he’d become suicidally depressed and be on his knees sobbing in front of me.
He even asked me to go to couples therapy with him.
Even though we were no longer a couple.
I lost weight because I would avoid my apartment, skipping meals and staying away for as long as I could.
And the thing that made him realize that we were really over wasn’t me breaking up with him or kicking him out of my apartment, or any of those inconsequential things.
It was Isaac.
*This is part 11 in a series. Wow, I never meant it to get that long! It was about how I became a Christian. Now it has morphed into how I met my husband. I guess this could be part two of how I met him. Read my first impression of him here.
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