Brerah

Meet Sarah.....my fiance

As you may or may not have read in the last post, I am engaged. And due to the fact that I no longer live near many of the people who I grew up with or went to college with, many of you do not know Sarah....so I will introduce yall to each other, and what better place to do this than in my blog.

Sarah Rathbone was born and raised in Clinton, Louisiana, a bustling country town of 2,000 about 30 miles north of Baton Rouge. After graduating from Silliman Institute in Clinton in 1999, she went to Baylor University in Waco, TX. She spent 5 years at Baylor studying psychology and involving herself in various activities including RUF. After she graduated from Baylor in 2004, she began the Doctor of Physical Therapy program at Belmont University in Nashville.

We met last October on a Wednesday night after one of the Vanderbilt RUF meetings, and shortly after that, we began to spend alot of time together in groups, and then more and more often with just each other. I didn't ask her out until we returned from Christmas break in January, but given the amount of time that we had spent together and seeing how much we enjoyed each other, I was pretty confident that she would go out with me. I was wrong.

I asked her out for the first time in mid-January, she said that her feelings had changed, and I was left crushed. I couldn't take no for an answer. So I didn't, and I asked her out about two weeks later. Same story, NO. I was pretty crushed at that point, seeing as how I had just been told No by a girl for the 1st and 2nd time in my life. Pride was dwindling.

For the rest of the Spring, I took a few girls out on dates, but each time afterwards, something wasn't right, I wanted them to be like Sarah. I fondly remember sitting in Brian Habig's (our campus minister at the time) office and telling him that I just wanted Sarah Rathbone to like me, and being so frustrated that she didn't. Meanwhile, during the spring, I was still around Sarah a few times per week, usually at church or hanging out with friends from church and we maintained a friendship, albeit a little difficult because I wanted her to like me. Then at the end of April, it was time. It was time to ask her out again. She had been warming up to me nicely for the previous few weeks, and I knew that the soup was right. NO. Not just no, but "Brent, I just don't have romantic feelings for you." Ouch, that was kind of like a chip going down my throat sideways, it hurt. So I was done. No more asking her out, nothing. I didn't want to keep bugging her.

I left about 1 week later to go to the RUF summer conferences in Panama City, FL. It was nice to be down there, and lo and behold, one of the RUF girl interns and I starting talking a little bit, and we went out with a few other interns on a group date in between summer conference weeks. We talked about keeping in touch and trying to maybe go out again in the summer and that's about where the status stood when Sarah came rolling into Florida for the 2nd week of conference.

Long story somewhat shortened. Sarah came to me and said that her feelings had changed. I was floored, didn't know what to do, but told her that it was bad timing because I had told this other girl that we would try to go out again in the summer. The girl called me and told me that she didn't want to go out or see each other again, and if there was ever more providential timing in my life, it has gone unnoticed.

Stay tuned for installment #2....................

posted by corbs @ 1:18 PM