I hung up Eric’s work shirts the other morning. One of them was a lime green polo. And I thought to myself, This is the shirt I met Eric in.

It seemed a bit unreal, that we'd ever actually met, that we haven’t always known each other.

But I remember that night so clearly. We were playing volleyball in our school gym, and I was at the far side of the court from the entrance. I heard the doors open and close, and before I looked up, I smelled cologne. All the way across the gym.

And there was that lime green shirt.

The Baers had just moved to our area from Ohio, and I’d seen Eric once before at church, but I hadn’t actually met him. We got on the same team the next time we renumbered. He asked me my name. “Chayli.” He had to ask it two more times before he understood it.

“Do they ever call you Chay for short?” he asked.

I told him no, although a very few people did. I didn’t tell him that Chayli was already a nickname for Michayla.

I don’t remember if he set me up by him that night or not. I didn’t know that before long we would be playing beside each other every time we were on the same team, that he would always place me as his setter. I didn’t know he would teach me and my brother Drew how to play rook and that we would play for hours and hours, he and I almost always as partners. I didn't know we would end up spending so much time together, but even at that first meeting something in me hoped we would.

I can't resist posting a few pictures of us (and our friends) from that wonderfully fun and exciting year that followed the first sighting of the lime green shirt. 🙂 We learned to know each other that year, and amid all the hiking and the rook games and the boating and the disc golfing, we fell in love.

I liked him from the start, but I had no idea one day I would be hanging that lime green shirt in the closet and remembering what had become a distant, beautiful memory.

The shirt is a work shirt now, and we’ve been married for almost five years. Time does really amazing things sometimes, and God does even more amazing things. He has blessed us so incredibly much.

I still can’t believe it some days. 🙂