Chapter 1

Someone asked me "what's your story?" so I thought I'd start with the second most important meeting in my life.

I knew John. That’s why I sat where I did. She sat on the other side of John. I didn’t know her and it didn’t really occur to me to find out too much about her at first. Just trying to stay with my “kind” in a class with a bunch of people I didn’t know. By “kind” I mean choir people. Or theater people. It wasn’t for a while that I realized we shared a couple of common interests. We both tried out for the fall play, “The Diviners”, and made it. She was blond, skinny, and had a slight lisp. Not enough to be distracting or make fun of, but just enough to be really adorable.
One day, John was sick and since we shared common interests, I filled the seat next to her. We made small talk. About the play, school, people we knew and such. I knew her brother she knew a couple of my friends. Turns out we ran in circles that overlapped and we just hadn’t crossed paths yet. It also turned out that she knew Jesus. REALLY well. She was shocked that I knew Jesus, which says a lot about my faith at the time, but that’s a whole other deal. Fact is, we both knew Jesus and that was more important than anything else to us at that moment. She was an angel.
We have to jump back a little bit so you understand why I call her angel. February, 1998, I was dating this great girl. She was a year older and about to graduate and move on in the world. We split up and that summer, I grew to love Jesus a lot. I knew that with the school year upon us, I would be extremely tempted to run after ungodly things. So I prayed. I asked God for someone to hold me up and keep me from falling. Turns out, her name was Sascha.
During that fall after we met, we started to hang out after school, during rehearsal for the play we were in. There was a deep attraction that went beyond physical things. To be completely honest, her looks, though incredible, were not what attracted me to her in the first place. She had this unique relationship with God. She prayed and things happened. She spoke about Jesus like she really knew Him. She cared about the state of other people’s souls…at 17… I don’t care who you are, that’s attractive on a very deep level.