Chapter 23: The First Date

Loren:

    Nancy and I had known each other for less than two weeks when she left for Europe, so the astute reader may recognize a risk she was running. During her absence, someone else from my circle of friends might have eclipsed her and taken away the lead. But as it happened, all of them drifted into relationships of their own at about that same time and stopped logging on altogether. There was only one exception, which quickly ended too.

    While awaiting Nancy’s return, I composed a couple of emails and sent them in advance, so she would have something waiting in her mailbox to welcome her home. We were no longer using the meeting service, but had switched to our regular email accounts. Soon there came a reply, “Hi, I’m back!” and it was time for our letter writing to resume.

    In her letters, a new tone emerged. She began a series of polite questions that were designed to explore our compatibility. What did I think about pets? (she had a darling cat). What did I think about drinking wine? (she’s from an Italian heritage). What did I think about praise, and the Holy Spirit, and the gifts of the Spirit, and what were some of my basic beliefs? (I was only too happy to share them!) But those are the sort of questions a person asks when they’re serious, especially when their questions resemble a ‘checklist,’ so I was very pleased with this development. We were conversational about it, and I was asking similar questions of her.

    If you’ve been out of the dating scene for a while, you can imagine what sheer joy such correspondence can bring. Suddenly a renewed sense of life had come; feelings of hope, edification, and appreciation—and possibly even of love, if the very near future should hold to that course and bring us there.

    Not long afterwards, Nancy and I had our first phone conversation. I was familiar with ‘shifting perceptions’ so I prepared myself in advance—but this time I was pleasantly surprised. Nancy had a lovely, almost musical voice, with vibrant tones in a constant melody. It was really a pleasure listening to her! And as it happened, my voice was very close to what she’d imagined so that she, too, had escaped the phenomenon this time.

    Now that our relationship was growing, I thought it was time for us to meet. I wanted to visit on a weekend but that presented a problem. I needed to be in church on Sunday mornings to teach my class, and I wasn’t sure if I could make a complete round trip on a Saturday (though later on, I would do this often). Somehow, we needed the Lord to create an opportunity for me.

    As it happened, Easter was drawing near and that was the opportunity we needed. Sunday School at my church was canceled that week in order to accommodate the extra attendance, and that allowed me to slip away quietly. We began planning our meeting for that Saturday evening. But what would our date be like?

    In our profiles, one of the essay questions had addressed that very thing: “How would you describe the perfect first meeting?” Nancy had mused on a ‘chance’ encounter at Barnes and Noble in the foreign travel section, leading to a cup of coffee and a chat at Starbucks. During the conversation, he would notice her lovely eyes. I joked about that remark because she had only posted one photograph and she was wearing sunglasses!

    In any case, I did what I believed Jesus would have done and accepted the scenario she’d feel comfortable with. So we talked it over, set the times and planned our first meeting.

Nancy:

    By this time I was very interested in Loren, but my defensiveness was also beginning to stir. I wanted to meet him, yet another part of me was starting to look for the exit. An internal struggle was rising. Finally, as sort of a ‘compromise’ with myself, I decided to go ahead and meet him, but to ask lots of questions. I was determined to find every skeleton in his closet.

    By the time our day arrived, enthusiasm had gained the upper hand so I was nervous but rather cheerful. As I pulled into the parking lot at Barnes and Noble, I began looking for cars with Texas plates. There were none, but one car was parked the other way around with shirts hanging up in the back. “Oh, that’s his car!” I thought.

    Suddenly I felt overwhelmed and stopped. I wanted to go somewhere else and pray. But after a moment I calmed myself, so I gathered my purse and went into the bookstore. I was a little early, so I walked around, sort of scouting things out and taking my time. Then I came to the foreign travel section, turned the corner—and there he was, looking at a map of Scotland.

    “Loren?” I asked.

    “Hi, are you Nancy?” and we shook hands. “No sunglasses?” he asked. I’d worn them inside, but had turned them up to the top of my head. I pointed to them and smiled.

    I think we must have talked about his trip, or ‘how was your day,’ or some basic pleasantries at first. Neither of us can remember it now. For the first time in our correspondence, there was no paper trail! Soon we were strolling toward the back of the store on our way to Starbucks. But on the way I had a thought:

    “You know, it’s almost 5:00 and I’m already hungry. Would you like to just skip this and go to dinner?” Loren was hungry too, so he agreed at once. I knew that his favorite food was Mexican food, so I’d chosen a Mexican restaurant to be congenial.

    Tulsa was my town, so I led the way in my car and Loren followed in his. I’m Miss Speedster when it comes to driving, so I looked in my rearview mirror to check his progress. “Oh, no!” I thought. “He’s poky!” Loren’s more of a cautious driver than I.

    Within 15 minutes we arrived at Cafe Olé, which had a nice, casual atmosphere with a cozy outdoor fireplace. We chose a table on the patio because Loren had said, in his profile, that he thought a first meeting should take place in a quiet atmosphere where we could hear and be attentive to each other.

Loren:

    When we arrived at Cafe Olé, Nancy suggested sitting outside. It was really a little cold for that, but we were both wearing long sleeves so I agreed. At the time, I hadn’t realized that she was basing this on my own suggestion!

    When the menus came, Nancy noticed that our waitress was pregnant, so she struck up a conversation with her about it. It amazed me how open and friendly she could be toward others. (In fact, we returned a year later and she remembered the same waitress, and asked about the baby!) As we looked through the menus, the waitress returned with our drinks. We ordered the three-cheese enchiladas.

    What happened next was a complete surprise. With a knowing smile, Nancy hefted a stack of booklets from the chair onto the table top. Some of them were old photo albums, which we never got around to. But the first one she opened was a binder containing all of my old emails.

    “Just a few things I wanted to ask you about,” she said, with the same eager smile.

    As my eyes fell on the stack of emails, nearly an inch thick by now, there must have been a funny look on my face. Because they all had items that she’d underlined, or highlighted in yellow, or circled in red, with questions written out in the margins. One of those questions said, “Is it safe?” which worried me greatly. Then she produced a pen, which she used to mark each question as we plodded through them.

    “Pity the poor fool,” I thought with dismay, “who would have tried lying to this girl, because she would have found him out!”

    At first we went through her questions in order, but after a while she began skipping through them. She seemed to be loosening up, so I guess I had won her confidence. Soon she closed the binder entirely and we began talking about other things.

    Like other couples on a first date, we began by discussing our similarities—topics that were familiar to us both, yet different enough to pique each other’s interest with a different per­spective. That’s often how new ties are made.

    One of the things we discussed was her conversion from Catholicism, which I had asked to hear again. She told me of a close friend named Alex whom she had met in Chicago, who had led her to the Lord, and how that came to be. And they’ve remained close friends to this day.

    From there, we reminisced about our early Christian days, since we had come to the Lord at about the same time in 1979. Things were much different then, we agreed; it seemed there had been such fervency, and the entire church was that way. It was an exciting, life-changing experience that we shared with other believers: righ­teous­ness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, catching the desire of the soul with lives that were completely devoted to Christ in pleasing Him.

    I still had a few old friends like that, and our conversation reminded me of the times I’d spent with them. “I really like this girl,” I found myself thinking, and the feeling kept growing in my heart.

    Dinner arrived, and our conversation slackened to allow some bites and nibbles. By now we were both very hungry and we’d asked for more chips and salsa. Our conversation continued past dark, which again reminded me of the older days.

    In an amused way, I noticed that Nancy was licking off her own lipstick as the night wore on, though she didn’t seem to realize she was doing it. “Maybe she’s not used to wearing lipstick?” I thought. “Maybe she just wore it for this date?” I was rather clueless, as men usually are in such ways. Then the conversation took a different turn:

    Nancy asked about another email I’d sent, in which I’d mentioned a young man who was being drawn into Mormonism. His co-worker, who attended my church, had asked for my help, so I’d talked it over with him and given him some materials.

    “How did that turn out?” she asked.

    “He didn’t join the Mormons, after all.” I answered. “Actually, he’s supposed to be visiting our church tomorrow.” which was Easter Sunday. As it turned out, my friend would be leading him to the Lord just a few days later.

    The material I’d given him was based on the testimony of Joseph Smith Jr, whom the Mormons consider a prophet. But I explained that he matched the profile of a false prophet much more closely: “False prophets are all alike,” I told her. “They’re entirely predictable if you know what to look for, and if you’ll just bear one more thing in mind: think of the options available to them at any point and they’ll always choose the most audacious one.”

    This was introducing a new subject, so Nancy suggested we do something else first. “How about we go to another place I know, for some coffee? Then we can talk about it some more.”

    “Good idea,” I replied with a smile. “Lead the way!” And then I called for the check.

    “Nancy,” I said as we rose, “I once had a girlfriend who was a waitress, so let me pass something along to you. We’ve been sitting at this table for hours now, and this table is how our waitress earns her living. So we need to give her a generous tip; especially since she’s heard us talking about the Lord.”

    “Oh, I agree!” she said at once. I wanted to be honest about that so she wouldn’t think I was doing this to impress her. But I was also trying to pass along a tidbit in fairness to waitresses everywhere.

Nancy:

    We’d skipped our coffee at Starbucks, but it was cold and I was still in the mood for some java, so I wanted to go to another place I knew, called Nordaggio’s. It was a warm, college café where students would sit and chat, or sip something hot while they studied. We took a table by ourselves. I ordered coffee, but Loren ordered hot cocoa with mounds of whipped cream.

    We spoke for another half hour, picking up our conversation where we’d left off. Loren had just introduced the subject of false prophets, so I asked how he knew so much about them? But this time, his answer startled me:

    “I’ve fought with a lot of them.” he said. “They started coming to my church.” I was stunned!

    n particular, Loren described a young man who had once been his best friend, who had turned into a false teacher. A clash began in their church as one of the elders sided with his friend, and one of the pastors sided with him.

    “I really learned the basics about false teachers through observing him.” said Loren, speaking of his former friend. “I would read from Jude or Second Peter 2, and suddenly I had a living example of those Scriptures right in front of my eyes! His example showed me exactly what those Scriptures were talking about. They even foretold some of his next steps.”

    I was astonished at what he said. “Whatever happened to him?” I asked.

    “Well, the Lord was going by those Scriptures, too,” he explained, with a sad reference to Second Peter 2:1-3. Shortly afterward, his friend had died, and the Lord had even foretold the manner of his death. Now that sort of informa­tion scared me a lot!

    “But,” said Loren, speaking of him sadly, “he did a lot of harm before then.”

    Earlier in the evening we’d spoken of the happy, earlier days of our walk with the Lord; but for Loren, this tragic episode had marked ‘the end of innocence’ as I call it. And I could tell that there were still painful memories involved. He was still wounded from all of this—I could hear it in his voice.

    Then, in rapid sequence, he told me of similar confrontations with some other false teachers who came to his church a little afterward. Later, we referred to these as his ‘war stories.’

    Now I knew for sure that Loren was a very committed, uncompromising Christian, but it scared me because of how strong he really was in that direction. It was something I was not ready to hear. That much strength might walk all over someone like me, who was weaker and unaccustomed to such things! I’d heard a lot about grace or how we should walk in victory, and that the Lord would grant us prosperity. But I was just beginning to accept the fact that God might allow some of us to suffer for His name. It was a struggle—I almost couldn’t bear what he was telling me. But I managed to hide my feelings.

    When our night was over, I went home and started rehearsing the evening in my thoughts. A tennis match began in my mind. Most of our conversation at dinner had seemed so good, but that last half hour at Nordaggio’s had disturbed me. It sent up a yellow flag—not a red one, just a yellow one. “I gotta find out about this,” I thought. It had been a long time since I’d dated anyone. “How is this going to work out?”

    In reality, my quiet tendency toward sabotage was beginning to stir again, and I was beginning to feel its influence. But I was trying to be fair to him, too. Nothing had been discouraging except his war stories; everything else we had discussed seemed positive.

    The next morning we met at my church, as we’d planned beforehand. Normally we would suggest that you not plan a follow-up date in advance, as we were doing now, but this particular Sunday happened to be Easter so that was never a serious question. It was impossible to think of missing it.

    Soon afterward, the pastor of that church began a gentle series on how God might allow us to suffer. He taught this in a very sensitive way, unlike the shock of Loren’s war stories, and that helped me to address the concern I was still feeling. But that was still in the future, and in the meantime I remained unsure.

    After church, Loren immediately returned to Dallas and I spent the rest of the afternoon with some of my friends. At first, I’d asked to bring him along, but their Easter plans had already been made and it was really too awkward for them to change now.

    At lunch, they naturally wanted to hear about our date the night before. I had previously mentioned Loren to them with great optimism. But by now my fears had gained the upper hand again, and I cried.