Thread by @ZachWLambert

I met my first love in a 6th grade English class.

I was so disruptive that my teacher moved my desk into the corner of the room and then put a tri-fold gym mat around me so I couldn’t see anything except the wall.

The person closest to me was a girl named Amy...

My first day in behind the mat, I forgot my pencil. I obviously didn’t want to get in even more trouble, so I cautiously peaked my head over the top of the mat when my teacher turned around to write on the board.

I whispered, "Amy!" And then asked if I could borrow a pencil.

I honestly thought she would either say no or just ignore me.

You see, Amy was a super compliant, straight-A student who was a faithful member of her youth group and beloved by every adult at the school.

I was not.

I was a punk who’d been kicked out of a church and a private Christian school in just the previous year alone.

I would actually go on to set the record for referrals and lunch detentions a year the very next year as a 7th grader.

Side note: It was 37 office referrals and over 100 lunch detentions in case you were wondering. According to my sources at the middle school, no one has ever come close to to those numbers.

I'm the Barry Bonds of middle school troublemakers.

Ok, back to the story.

I ask Amy for a pencil and to my surprise, she said yes!

She tossed one over the walls of my gym mat jail cell and I was able to complete my assignments for the day.

We had most of our classes together that year and I always ended up sitting next to her.

No other teacher went as far as the gym mat, but I would inevitably get in trouble and be moved away from the other hooligans and next to the most exemplary student in class.

Which was Amy.

A few months into 6th grade, we knew we liked each other. We never held hands or anything like that, but there was a serious spark.

But her dad had a unyielding rule:

No dating until she was 16.

We went through middle school in puppy love, but at the end of 7th grade her family decided to move.

I was distraught. Amy was mildly glum.

But on the last day of school, we made a promise: I would be her first "real date” when she turned 16.

For the next four years we kept up through AIM (AOL Instant Messenger for all you non-millennials) and when her 16th birthday finally rolled around, I took Amy out for her first date.

I thought it went well!

She did not.

That's because we had taken seemingly inevitable and divergent paths since that promise at the end of 7th grade.

I spent the vast majority of my time playing sports and smoking weed, while she was a leader in her youth group and on track to graduate early as the salutatorian.

Amy knew we were headed in very different directions and that dating me wasn't exactly a wise choice, so after the date when I texted her, “let’s hang out again soon!”

She politely replied, “maybe just as friends :).”

We didn’t see each other much over the next year, but when the summer before my senior year of high school and her freshman year of college came around, we were brought together by God or fate or some combination of the two.

One night out on Lake Travis with some friends, I overdosed on a combination of cough medicine and alcohol.

The next night, I was back on the lake trying to pretend nothing had happened when I watched a college student overdose and drown right in front of us.

Needless to say, I was shaken up.

After that experience, I began to struggle through some existential questions. Things like:

- Why am I here?
- What is the purpose of life?
- Is God real?

Even though I’d been kicked out of church and found the Christianity I’d been exposed to archaic and oppressive, I decided to start trying to find these answers by reading the Bible.

Thank God I started in the Gospels.

I had always known about the beginning and end of Jesus’ life (Christmas and Easter), but I had no idea about the rest of it.

I couldn’t believe how much he loved to hang out with and help the people on the margins!

How he didn’t care about getting in trouble for sharing a meal with tax collectors and prostitutes (the folks I most identified with) and how he just loved people so radically.

I fell in love with the love of Jesus.

But I had no idea what to do or who to tell about it.

Then it hit me, “I have to call Amy!” She was the only Christian I'd ever known who didn't judge me or beat me over the head with a Bible.

So I invited her to lunch.

We ended up spending hours together that day, just talking about life and Jesus and everything in between.

I told her about all the terrible things I had been doing--using and selling drugs, breaking into houses, getting in fights, even more lunch detentions, etc.

I half expected her to stand up and politely excuse herself from my sinful presence, but she didn’t.

Amy treated me exactly like the Jesus I read about treated people.

And just like I fell in love with his love, I began to fall in love with hers as well.

There is so much more to the rest of the story, but the short version is this:

- We started dating a few weeks later.
- Got married when we were 21.
- Had our first child when we were 25.
- Planted @RestoreATX when we were 26.
- And will have been married 12 years this May.

I’m honestly not sure I’d still be a Christian without Amy, much less a pastor.

We’ve been through so much together: foster care, church planting, deconstruction, reconstruction, deep pain and indescribably beauty.

She is my guiding light, my intellectual superior, and my best friend.

I have loved her since I was 11 years old and I will never stop.

I love you, Amy. Happy Valentine’s Day.