13 February 2017

(Herbie), The Love Bus

  In honor of Valentine’s Day:

My husband’s additions and comments are in blue lettering inside parenthesis.  He also added "Herbie" to the title.

Stanley Mission
Once upon a time, there was a young woman between her third and fourth years of college who was fed up with men.  In spite of this, she was excited about every other aspect of life and the things God was teaching her at the time, and she happily traveled approximately 1200 miles on the road to spend two weeks in a First Nations community teaching young children about Jesus with a group from her home church.  She had heard that another group would be travelling up to join them for the second week, but she didn’t give that fact much thought until someone mentioned that the newcomers would include several young men.  While some of the high school girls in her group were giddy with excitement, she, quite frankly, was rather annoyed at the prospect.  Picturing unruly, obnoxious, and over-confident young miscreants (ha ha… “miscreants”)  who had very little concept of how to appropriately obtain attention, she found herself mildly dreading their arrival. 

Jon's Band Days
At the start of the second week, she watched with suspicious curiosity as everyone piled out of the large school bus.  Then, something unexpected happened.  She recognized some of the faces.  Several years ago, during her first mission trip to northern Saskatchewan, she had met a couple of girls who, upon returning home, had invited her to a concert.  At this concert, her friends introduced her to the band members, with whom she then had occasional minimal contact whenever her youth group and their youth group had combined events or whenever the band performed a concert in her area.  Two of those band members (brothers) exited the bus along with the new wife of the older brother.  Maybe some of these newcomers might not be so unbearable after all (which sounds like we were invading your island).  At least they were close to her age. 

It's a little embarrassing how obvious this is...
Not much time passed before the younger brother caught the young woman’s attention.  He was a year younger than her, and she remembered him as the scrawny and fairly reserved (if not even slightly unfriendly) bass player with wildly long, curly hair that hid his face as he played.  He had been nowhere near being on her radar before, especially considering the fact that they had both been dating other people when their paths had crossed before (and the young woman had previously had a fancy for the older brother).  Now, his red hair was much shorter, his build was that of a young man who had  just spent a year in ROTC, the scruffy chinstrap that adorned his face (what is this, Song of Solomon?)  made him look much closer to her age, and he didn’t come across nearly as cold as he had before.  She watched as he led the three and four year olds in some sort of game that involved him running back and forth within a rectangle of orange cones with the mob of crazy little munchkins following closely at his heels. 

This picture is also a little embarrassing for me, but Jon told me later that he was singing straight to me when they sang "Collide" by Howie Day, so I know he was just as aware of my presence.  

Though she tried to stay focused on the ministry at hand, she didn’t resist the little moments of flirting that started to surface.  She listened intently as he played guitar with his brother and sang the harmony parts to various songs.  She saw him walking by as she was playing frisbee with one of the kids, and she accidentally threw the frisbee straight at him.  He still swears to this day that the throw was intentional, but she knows that it really was just bad aim on her part (you lie!).  The young man asked her to hold his hoodie while he participated in some of the Canadian Independence Day competitions.  She was impressed with how fast he completed the running portion and couldn’t help but smile when he and his Canadian partner dominated in the canoe portion.  She also noticed that, though their seating arrangement at meal times was determined by an older adult who set out cups with everyone’s names on them, she still kept ending up next to him, across from him, or diagonal from him.  He now admits that he moved the cups after they were set out.
Cup Switching Results

When the day came for them to return home, the young man’s father kept asking the young woman if she wanted to ride in the smaller, more comfortable vehicle instead of the bus.  She was too embarrassed to admit to her true reasons, but eventually she convinced him that she really did want to ride in the bus.  She walked onto the bus and didn’t see the young man yet, so she chose an empty seat.  Her heart sank a little when a different young man sat down next to her.  However, her hopes were not completely vanquished.  They weren’t on the road long before the band member came and joined her and her travelling companion to play a few card games.  Eventually, they ended up in the same seat, and the travelling companion relocated when he started feeling like a third wheel (the young man and woman had to apologize to him later for that).  They talked for the rest of the long bus ride as the young man’s father watched in the rearview mirror and as his sister-in-law placed a bet that the two would get married. 

At the Airport
Once they were finally home, they exchanged phone numbers.  Within the following week, they started dating, and then the young woman left for a five-week mission trip to Europe.  They e-mailed each other when they could, and the young woman sent him a letter from Italy.  She was to return the day before school started again at Frontier School of the Bible.  Neither of them was sure whether the young man would be accepted at Frontier or return to school in Ohio before she came back to the States.  She rejoiced when, near the end of her trip, she received the news that he had been accepted at Frontier (I feel like I should be reading this with a Pride and Prejudice accent).  He drove to Denver so that he would be there when her plane landed, and he picked her up and twirled her in a tight hug as her mission trip friends all oo-ed and aw-ed.  After sixth months, they got engaged (a story for another time), and about one year after they started dating, the young man’s sister-in-law won her bet, and the bus has forever since been dubbed “The Love Bus” by the young man’s father.                                                                 

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