My love story (part 2)

In the fall of 2011 one of my friends started acting different. He started following me around more and emailing me more frequently. But instead of liking this new attention I was very much opposed to the idea. I could tell that my friend (btw his name is Noah) was developing feeling for me but he had always been such a great friend that I wanted it to stay that way. I was afraid to let him down. I knew he had the sweetest heart and I did not want to be the one to break it, but I knew he was NOT for me. So I began scheming with God in my prayer life. I was asking God to send Noah a gorgeous girl into his life and distract him from me so I did not have to let him down. But I also knew that Noah could not just get anyone so I began praying he would get a sweet helpmeet that would complement his wonderful personality. Well one day I was driving to work and talking to God about all of this and I felt like God was asking me a big question. He said to me “Why Paulina?” “Why won’t you even consider Noah?” And I could not come up with a good answer. I tried to think of some negative things about Noah but everything I knew about him was wonderful. The only thing that stood in my way was Noah did not look like my “Mr Right”. As I was thinking that, I could almost feel God looking at me with a raised eyebrow…letting me know I might want to re-evaluate my heart. So as I looked deeper I saw God was of course right and that this guy was everything that I had ever prayed about. The amazing thing is God's timing was impeccable. For the last two months Noah had been talking with my Daddy about me and his intentions. They had been talking back and forth about goals, convictions; backgrounds, everything and I had no idea. Just around the time my Dad gave Noah the “green light” to ask me to start a relationship, God had changed my heart completely! When my Daddy sat me down and told me he had been talking to Noah and thought he was an honorable young man and asked my opinion, I was thrilled. I felt total peace in saying yes to a relationship and felt excited in the way God was directing my heart. So December 17^th 2011 Noah and I started our courtship. We wanted it to be God honoring and we wanted to set a good example for our kids someday, in our relationship. So we decided we did not even want to kiss until our wedding day and keep physical contact to a minimum. It was hard but it sure was worth it. Instead of focusing on all the physical we focused on really getting to know each other’s minds. We had a very active courtship and tried to involve both sets of families. We would go on lots of double dates with my parents and his. We would take turns taking siblings as chaperones to different events or hiking trips with us. It was so fun to involve our siblings and I think it helped them to adapt to adding a new person to the family instead of feeling replaced. The amazing thing is I fell so deeply in love with Noah in such a short amount of time. He worked so hard to win my heart! My best friend turned into a romantic mush ball and I loved it. It was a whole different side to him that was neat to experience, a whole new side to a great friendship. I loved every minute of our courtship. We went on several camping trips with my whole family. We went on vacation with Noah’s whole family. Lots of amazing time together to just see what each other was like in lots of different circumstances. When February came around we knew we wanted to get married. A lot of people thought it was too soon but they did not understand how our relationship was so purposeful and directional. However Noah was still not very settled in his job and what he wanted to do with his vocation. So we had to wait a little longer….