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LARRY & AMANDA'S TALE

LARRY AND AMANDA'S TALE

THE JOY OF GIVING OURSELVES AWAY...

“And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord …

who hold fast to my covenant— these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.” (Isaiah 56:6-7)

Valentine’s Day happened to be Larry and Amanda’s second dating anniversary, and Larry picked his girlfriend up first thing in the morning with exciting plans for the day. He handed Amanda a CD he had compiled specially for their second anniversary and grinned: “See if you can work out what all these tracks have in common. There’s a secret theme to the whole day hidden in these songs.” Amanda stared excitedly at the CD, reading the track-listing before shaking her head.  “No idea so far,” she laughed and gave Larry a kiss.

They spent the day driving happily up the beautiful Oregon coast, the CD playing in the background as they gazed out to sea. Occasionally, they left the car to walk hand- in-hand on one of the many sandy beaches along the way.

As dusk fell and the moon rose, Larry parked the car at a lookout point to watch the darkening sky fill with stars. Like lovers since the beginning of time, Larry and Amanda watched in wonder, and as they did so, Amanda realized that the theme of her CD was “stars.”  

“I had absolutely no idea that Larry was about to propose to me,” she recalls. “Instead I figured maybe he was about to present me with a telescope—possibly the least romantic gift known to womankind!” The telescope Larry produced from the back of his car turned out to have been borrowed from a friend, and so—with a measure of relief—Amanda joined him in scanning the distant firmament through its lens. “It was great,” she admitted, “until Larry got completely fixated with finding a constellation called ‘Draco.’” 

Finding Draco

Finding Draco took ages, but eventually Larry located the evasive constellation with visible relief: “I want to show you something,” he explained. “Take a look.” Amanda found herself gazing through the telescope at a solitary star. 

“It’s named after you.”

 “A star named Amanda?” she asked dubiously. “Wow, that sure is a weird name for a star.”

 “It’s not just called Amanda,” said Larry patiently, gazing at the girl by his side as she stared intently at a star a million miles away in the Draco constellation. “That star,” he said slowly, “is called Amanda Leigh Nichols.”

Amanda stepped back from the telescope in surprise. “Wow!” she said again, genuinely amazed that someone had once named a star with her first two names and Larry’s surname. Suddenly she understood why Larry had spent so long looking for it. “How clever of you to find it; that’s incredible!” 

She stooped to take another look through the telescope with newfound interest, and when she looked up again, her heart missed a beat. Larry was on one knee looking up at her: “I think it should be your name forever,” he said.

At last Amanda realized—Larry had named the star after her.

Naming the stars

It was late as they drove home along the coast, talking excitedly about the future that had so suddenly opened up before them. Stepping into her bedroom much later that night with her head still swimming in some distant constellation, Amanda found one more surprise waiting: Her room was filled with stars—dozens of them hanging from the ceiling. “It’s beautiful,” was all she could say. “Amanda Leigh Nichols,” she repeated to herself as she drifted off to sleep that night. Amanda Leigh Nichols—her name and his, written together by love, forever in the stars.

The romance of Larry and Amanda’s engagement encapsulates a story as old as time. A boy meets a girl. They are attracted to one another, they get to know one another, they like one another more and more, and somehow, some time along the way, they find that they have fallen in love. But falling in love is not the end of the story. In fact, you could say that it is only the beginning. Having fallen in love, the couple long for more. And so, just as looking became liking, and liking led to loving, so now loving leads a man and a woman to leave all else and make the vows of ultimate commitment in the covenant of marriage.

No one has forced them to surrender themselves in such a way. They commit their lives to one another because they long for their love to be written in the stars. And as they promise to be faithful in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, exclusively committed to one another “’til death us do part,” they know it is the beginning of one of life’s great adventures...

They are giving away everything they own and submitting all they are to another person, but far from being a moment of restriction and loss, the covenant is a moment of liberation, joy, and unadulterated excitement.

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