'Til The One Day When This Lady Met This Fellow

(Pink comments added by Victoria.  I love this story of how we met and I'm so thankful to Kevin for taking the time to type it up.)

I thought I would write about the beginning of our family of nine, or how Victoria and I met. I was a divorced dad and had been living on my own with the kids (half time) since the summer of 2001.
I had tried online dating, mostly Yahoo! Personals, but also Match.com and eHarmony. I really thought this was a good idea for me, for several reasons:

• I was older and didn't have many friends or peers that were single.
• I had the kids quite a bit and didn't have alot of time or money for conventional dating.
• I was comfortable with computer technology and able to go online often

So I had personal ads online at several sites. It seemed to me that there were many more guys online than girls so the numbers were not in my favor, but I still tried. I replied to some ads and had numerous online chats. Some of these led to phone conversations and a few of these led to dates.

I did have one date, a trip to Cedar Point, with a girl that I had never even spoken to before our first date, every communication we had up to that point had been online. That was our only date so maybe it wasn't such a good plan.

So anyways, at the time I was also spending lots of time in an online Euchre league, and at the same time chatting online with Yahoo! messenger, where I was known as kev_cleve.

Well one Saturday night in May as I was playing cards, I got a little heart message in my system tray, which meant I had a Yahoo! Personals reply. I was quite surprised since I had only had I think 2 girls contact me first in about a year of having my ad online. (His picture was kind of scary and he had 3 kids under age 6.)

Now I had had several replies from girls that I had contacted, but almost never did someone contact me first.
Anyways, in the reply Victoria introduced herself and mentioned the Alive festival. I replied back to her right away and mentioned that we were having Vacation Bible School the week of Alive. (Alive Festival rocks!)

A few minutes later the little red heart showed me that she had replied back again. This time mentioning that her church had VBS that week also and asking what church I attended.

When she got my reply, Victoria realized that she and I already attended the same (small) church!

"This is SO WEIRD!!!!" she said twice in her response back. (see extended footnote below.)  As I said, it was a Saturday night and after 3 short messages each way, we realized we were destined to meet the next morning in our church service.

So that is the story of how we met. More courtship tales to come when I get the chance to type them.

**Kevin couldn't know HOW weird.  When I prayed about dating again, I had only asked the Lord that He not lead me to anyone from our church.  I didn't want to risk any awkwardness if a relationship didn't work out.  And here I was reaching out online among THOUSANDS and who do I hit on first??  Some random guy who actually already attends my (teeny tiny storefront) church.   Boy did I feel admonished!  Not that that was the first, or the last (unfortunately) time HE had to remind me exactly who was in charge.