On How I Met Nancy

Searching for a truly reformed single lady has been quite a challenge. The reformed churches in the United States (the RCUS as well as fraternally related denominations) tend to be small and very spread out. I wrote a while ago about how there were relatively few truly conservative reformed women. Sure, there are some large PCA churches in the area--some of those are conservative, but a lot are quite modern too. Perhaps this is just generally true of large churches--there will be a mixture. As a side note, what always worried me about the large PCA churches is that the people in them really weren't Presbyterians. I had a friend who grew up in a large PCA church here in town and yet after 20 years or so I asked him what the five points of Calvinism were--the response I got was a blank stare. I suppose I desired a wife that would be more educated and truly Reformed or Presbyterian.

With this situation, my friends and I always joked that we'd either have to search somewhere else where there were more options (I'd even heard rumors of visiting California or Nebraska for this very purpose) or attempt to "convert" one of these more liberal women to a truly reformed faith. Now I suppose slowly teaching a young Christian the ways of the Reformed faith wouldn't be a bad thing, but I preferred trying to find a potential wife that was Reformed of her own before she met me. I guess I'd heard too many stories of people pretending to be interested in something just for the purpose of getting a person and then later on showing their more true colors.

This left the option of looking in other places for truly reformed women. I'd always been too prideful to try the online dating sites--even though I'm an avid Internet user. There was just something that seemed very desperate about doing this. After about a year or so of resisting this idea, my mom finally convinced me to try it out. The stipulation I put on this was that I wanted to try to meeting truly Reformed people and not just any old so called "Christian." In several Internet searches, I was amazed to actually find a site that claimed to be for only Reformed Singles. This was quite exciting; evidently other people had the same problem as I and they were using some new technology to help solve it. By the way, the site is Sovereign Grace Singles, and I would suggest it for anyone brave enough with technology and who sees the same problem.

After several months of being on that site, I was contacted by someone I now adore very much. I spoke with her on the phone and online for a couple of months before we met in person. Over New Years I journeyed to Canada (first time I'd been there in ages too) to visit Nancy. Things simply went really really well with her; honestly, I'd kind of feared that we wouldn't have gotten along in person as well as we did over the phone, but this was not true with her. She proved to be exactly the kind of conservative Reformed Christian I was looking for. Given that she was so conservative--she comes from a Dutch Reformed background--I thought it would probably be prudent to ask her parents' permission to date her. This was actually quite an interesting discussion as her sister ended up coming into the room while I was talking to her parents. Nothing quite like asking a rather nerve racking question with extra people listening; I'm not really sure her sister knew what to think of the whole thing and frankly neither did I.

Either way, they did give their consent, so I started a long distance relationship with Nancy that day (January 1st--don't you love easy dates to remember??? :-) ).

I'm really excited to see how things go; they have gone very well so far. One thing I've realized about long distance relationships is that in one way it's better: you get to know people by their words. On the other hand, some problems that would best be solved with a simple hug have to be talked about for much longer than normal. I'm glad there is an end in sight though; I hear rumors that we might be engaged soon, so that is something I, at least, will definitely look forward to. Perhaps later on I'll write on some suggestions and pitfalls I've seen with my own long distance relationships, but for now I'm just enjoying getting to talk to a woman I love. Oh how did people ever live without phones??? lol