“Two kids trying to outrun their inheritance together.”
Some love stories begin with certainty.
Ours began with dust.
My small hometown — sunburned and wind-worn. A place where dreams didn’t collapse in flames; they simply dried out. Poverty wasn’t always about money. It was in the thinking. In the ceilings people placed over themselves. In the quiet agreement that this was as far as life would go.
You could stay there forever without ever leaving the same street.
And yet, somehow, love found us there.
We were young — too young by most standards. Sixteen and fourteen. Two kids without a defined future, but with a quiet knowing that ran deeper than age. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t rebellion. It felt ancient — like recognition.
Almost biblical in tone.
Two kids trying to outrun their inheritance together.
What I didn’t know was that our story had begun before I ever stepped into it.
My mother was the first to see her.
She was a seventh grader. My mom worked as a campus aide — a hallway narc of sorts, keeping watch between classes. She would come home talking about this little blonde girl. Beautiful. Thoughtful. Sweet. The bluest eyes she had ever seen.
“She’s perfect for my Johnny,” she’d say.
I was a stubborn ninth grader — already in high school, already convinced I knew better. I dismissed it. Brushed it off. Destiny didn’t need my mother’s commentary.
Years passed.
No orchestration. No awareness of history. Just two teenagers crossing paths. I didn’t know she was the girl my mother had described. I only knew that when we talked, something settled in me. It felt like home before I understood what that meant.
There was depth there. Familiarity. A soul-level understanding without language for it.
When I introduced her to my parents, something unexpected happened.
My mother’s mouth hung open. Later that evening, she pulled me aside and told me the story. The girl I had chosen — the girl I believed I had simply “met” — was the very one she had spoken about years earlier. The seventh grader with the blue eyes. The one she quietly believed was meant for me.
In a town where scarcity seemed generational, God was quietly abundant.
In a place where resentment, divorce, dysfunction, and small thinking lingered in the air like dust, He planted something different. Not an escape plan. A partnership.
We didn’t have a roadmap. We didn’t have maturity. We didn’t have a defined future. But we had each other.
And sometimes that’s where covenant begins.
The Dust Bowl isn’t just about hardship. It’s about endurance in barren soil. It’s about planting anyway. Loving anyway. Building anyway — even when the land doesn’t promise much.
Looking back, I see what we couldn’t see then:
God was not just saving two kids.
He was interrupting inheritance.
We thought we were trying to outrun what shaped us.
But maybe He was already rewriting it.
“He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.” — Proverbs 18:22
‘Dust Bowl’ - Ethel Cain
Closing Prayer
Father,
Thank You for writing stories long before we recognize them.
Thank You for planting love in dry places and calling it holy.
Redeem what we inherited.
Strengthen what we are building.
And remind us that even in the dust, You are faithful to grow something eternal.
Amen.
