Third Time's A Charm

Ben and I met in middle school...on the bus. We signed each other’s yearbooks in eighth grade, but we didn’t have much more contact after that. He said we had chemistry class together in 1995, but I don’t remember. I did, however, make an impression on him!
In 2000, I was back in my hometown teaching Spanish at a middle school. I got a phone call from the front desk saying Ben M. was here to see me. The name sounded familiar, so I said to send him to my room. He came during my worst class and I met him in the hallway…for about 2 minutes. Kids were literally pressing their faces into the window and pounding on the door while I was in the hall, so I needed to get back in there! I later found out that he had planned his whole Spring Break around coming back to see me.
After he left, I felt bad that it was such a short time, so I looked him up on the Tech website and found his phone number and left him a message. He got it after a long drive back to Lubbock. This started our friendship…or so I thought! He thought we were more and I just wanted to be friends (on my terms). He later wrote me a letter and said that he had been praying one night about his future wife and thinking through the girls he had known, but my name kept coming up. (At the time of the letter, I thought he was crazy.)
Needless to say, we went our own ways after about a year and a half. He moved to Dallas and got a job with an architecture firm. I moved to Mexico and dated other people, but while living there I constantly thought of him has the guy who would be perfect for me (and my family LOVED him).
Upon returning to Dallas, I had e-mailed him a few times and mentioned that we should get together. He was really cautious, since I had been so rude to him before, but he said we could meet at Pappasito’s. We had a good time with great conversation (and he looked super cute in a snap shirt). I graciously let him pay for both of us, which I later found out drove him crazy since he didn’t want to start dating me!
We talked a few times and e-mailed a few times during the next week. The next Sunday, I called him at home and he asked, “Why did you call me?” At this point, I knew we needed to DTR. We then met at the start of August at Café Brazil and I had to apologize for how I had previously treated him and tell him that I’d like to start dating him with hopes of looking at marriage. (This was very humbling for me, but I had to do it--he told me he wouldn't have dated me if I had not said what I did.) We then dated and constantly talked about our future together, realizing that we had so many things in common (my eyes were finally opened).
For Christmas, we headed to Houston to have an early Christmas celebration with my family. He had made a plan with my mom to have our Christmas Eve dinner at lunch, which I didn’t know about. After lunch, everyone headed out to a random place and he came and asked me to go to a park with him. There, he led me into the woods and “discovered” a package—a picture of us that he had buried the day before. I was NOT dressed up and we then went to a nice Mexican restaurant where we were serenaded with “Besame Mucho”. I knew something was up and kept looking around for my family! Then we left and went to The Woodlands where we had a horse-drawn carriage ride. We then walked to the Christmas tree and he had brought a gift. It had a teddy bear in it with a nice letter written to me. The bear was holding a sack filled with pink Starbursts and a pewter heart that opened. Inside was my ring (that he designed on his own)! He dropped to one knee and proposed (with teenagers staring at us in the background). It was so romantic, but I kept looking for my family—who really wasn’t around! When we returned to the house, we told the story and took one (really bad) picture in front of the refrigerator.
We got married June 17, 2006 with family and friends all around. It was my dream wedding (although it did feel like we were actors up on a stage), complete with mariachis! We had a wonderful surprise (to me) honeymoon in Costa Rica. In September, we welcomed our son, Dietrich and look forward to having more children in the future.
I am so amazed how God brought us together at just the right time and gave both of us a desire to marry someone just like the other (we compared our list of qualities of our future mate before beginning to date). We have come so far in the past 2 and a half years and we look forward to where God will lead us and how we will grow to love Him and each other more through the years.

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