Full transparency… neither one of us saw any of this coming but in hindsight, we are soooo blessed that it did! Two souls traveling down two separate paths trying to make sense of it all! Two souls that tasted the sting of the world, through self inflicted choices as well as by the hand dealt to each of us by living for what the world had to offer. Living for self knocked us both down yet we stubbornly got right back up and chose to take another taste! Some might say that’s being a gluten for punishment, some would call us foolish, some would have Grace and see that we were just trying to figure it all out! Long story Short, our story starts like most… boy meets girl, both have been hurt before in various truly heart wrenching ways, both expect the worst, both are waiting for the bottom to fall out, but something is definitely different this time! There’s a ease and a peace that has never been before, the worst never comes to fruition, the bottom never falls out, however a foundation was being laid and a bond was being created! What’s different about this relationship than some other story’s like ours? God, God was, God is and God Forever will be the center of it all! Sundays we went to Church, Wednesdays we made dinner together and talked about everything and anything! Jordan saw the God in me and that was what was attractive to her, the peace I had when talking about the choices I made that led me down a destructive path as well as the hand that was dealt to me and how I was able to play it… God, my relationship as a son and my desire to be exactly what He created me to be is and was the only answer to how I survived it all and more importantly to why I had anything to offer her! Her story held some of the same choices that led her down a dark path, a path that dealt her a hand with some pretty heavy cards to play… the difference was she didn’t yet have that relationship with God, she pulled up her bootstraps and dug in all the while yearning for more with a void that was still left unfulfilled until she met the Lord, until she tasted and saw that He is good! A instant light switch was flipped and as I say, “she grabbed the ball and ran with it”! You see neither one of us truly realized what was happening until very recently… God was reshuffling the deck so to speak! All of those Sundays spent worshipping and Glorifying Him, leaning in and learning to apply His teachings, filling our cups so that we could pour them out into others… playing the new hand we were being dealt, this time the cards were in our favor and now our choices started to bear fruit! We laugh, we cry, we encourage, we give grace, we forgive, we hope, we dream, we believe in the good things and we pray for the opposition! God, God is what makes this relationship drastically different from any other either of us has ever experienced before! Our choices are based on truths, on Love, on humility, on dying to self so that we can be more like Him and less like this world, all the while the cards we are being dealt now continuously seem to be pretty good even when they are a tough hand to play, they are good because he holds all of our experiences in His hands! So here we are, two souls brought together for some reasons already shown and for so many still left to be revealed and that excites us! We know that there will be challenges and we know that there will be straight wins, that excites us! We know that we choose to make God the priority in our individual lives and that’s what allows us to come together stronger and better equipped to have an amplified effect in each others lives as well as in the lives of the people that we cross paths with and that too excites us! We choose to lean in, we choose to Love hard and we choose each other to navigate through this thing called life with God as our True North in the center of it all!