Dancing with gardenias?
Firstly, I had never even seen a gardenia. Secondly, the thought of a man who pranced up to me with a bouquet of gardenias made me grimace just a little.
You know how the human mind works, though. You second guess yourself. You think, "Was that me conjuring that thought from wishful thinking, or did God put it there?" And then you start thinking, "Does God even work like that? Is there a God? Is He Jesus Christ? Did I piece those two things together from vague memories? Am I in a cult? Am I insane?"
My answers to the above are: "Yes, yes, yes, yes, maybe, maybe, and maybe." :)
But despite the maybe's, if the answer to "Is there a God" and "Is He Jesus Christ" is "yes", then the rest doesn't matter.
*Sidenote*:
I've been reading The Case for Christ with my husband over the past month and now I am more convinced than ever. There are still issues in the Bible that I'm trying to reconcile though, don't get me wrong, but if you haven't read this book, you should give it a try-written by Lee Strobel. Get the study version. It's over 10 years old now but still worth it.
Anyway, I was insane and think I still am. We're all insane.
I took three things away from the Women's Conference which I've listed in order of how much I thought about them:
1. Dancing with Gardenias
2. The Journal
3. When you find the right one, you'll know without a doubt in your mind
I drove the 7 hours back to my little apartment in Fairborn, Ohio. My roommate was there waiting for me with an "I Missed You!" card, even though I'd only been gone about 4 or 5 days. I was very delighted though with her warm greeting.
I found myself trying to explain the whirlwind of what had happened over the past week, and I could see it in her eyes, "Wow, she is in deep. I'll humor her with absent eyes and head nods." I gave up trying to convince anyone of the things that I knew God had said to me and kept it to myself. I was honestly still trying to believe it for myself. "At least I have this journal as material evidence" I thought, even though the journal had nothing about gardenias on it.
I went back to work at Cracker Barrel and back to school at Wright State. You know what I did next: I scanned every guy that came across my path, wondering, "Does he have access to gardenias somehow?" I couldn't help but wonder. The journal sat on my desk untouched for about a month. There were a lot of cool little phrases on it, but I came to the conclusion that they could all apply in a relative way to pretty much any situation I found myself in.
Until....
One night I was sitting at my desk which I'd purchased from Salvation Army for I think $10, staring at the Myspace page on my laptop. I had just discovered Myspace a few months prior and thought it was the coolest thing ever. This was when it actually was cool, before it became a trash haven.
My journal was lying there next to the computer and I looked at it. One of the phrases jumped out at me all of a sudden: "Just like you." You know the thought that came to my mind next....
"I wonder if there are any other 'Casey Townsend's' in the world?"
The keyboard went "click, click, click" as I navigated to the search engine of Myspace and typed in 'Casey Townsend'.
The first picture I saw was this one:
Yes, I know, "TOO EASY", right? Exactly. Of course I thought he was adorable, but I kept thinking, "Okay, it can't be this easy!"
I mulled over in my mind what my next "move" should be. I think I had already decided immediately that this alleged "Casey Townsend" that I was beholding couldn't be a possibility. He was probably some kind of insecure short guy on here to build up his profile a couple of inches in hopes that someone would agree to meet him in person and be able to overlook it. He also probably wasn't a "real" Christian. He probably just wrote it on his profile to compensate for the shortness and other qualities that he was probably lacking (as in personality people, don't get perverted).
I waited until the next day, and then went on to check him out again. He looks fairly normal, I thought. I noticed that in addition to having the same first and last name, we also shared December birthdays. I noticed also, strangely, that he lived in North Carolina. Wow, what are the odds?
So, in an effort to not be a complete internet creepster, I decided to write him but only to let him know that I shared the same name as him, and to see if he lived anywhere near the church I had gone to for the conference. I was admittedly testing the waters to see if he was at least a normal human being, but still to my amazement I didn't have ulterior motives. I already had plans to move to NC after graduation, so I thought if he was already there maybe we could meet sometime and that it wouldn't be so creepy since I'd actually be living there of my own accord and not just to visit him. But the likelihood of us ever becoming an item was too far-fetched for me.
Well, somehow in the process of writing the first letter (I have no idea HOW) I forgot to mention that my last name was also Townsend. I must have totally spaced and only mentioned that I was a "fellow Casey".
The correspondence went as follows (taken from the original messages):
April 3rd 3:09pm
No Subject
Fellow Casey who loves Jesus! Yay:) I have a lot of friends in N.C. and S.C. with Morning Star and The Cause U.S.A., have you heard of either? Maybe you're even a part of it. God Bless you brother and take care~Casey
***
I can't believe I actually wrote "brother" in there! What a weirdo. I'm sure my old self did that in a desperate attempt to say without saying, "This is a friendly email, and that's all!
It took him a few days to write back, and when he did I believe it was a short message to humor me and say, "No, I'm not familiar with Morning Star, but sounds cool! Take Care-Casey"
I wasn't surprised that he was seemingly hollow, and I didn't write for 2 months and actually began to forget about him. We were Myspace friends and I was pretty sure that that would be the extent of our relationship and I was sure in about a year I would end up deleting him in a "friend cleansing".
Then, one day, he posted a blog announcing that his 19-year old sister had just gotten married. This event had revealed to him his own displeasure with the seeming reality that his life hadn't taken him anywhere noteworthy yet. He was 22, wasn't married, lived at home, and worked at a toner company which he loathed. His band hadn't taken off either and he was wondering if it ever would.
It was in this blog that I could see that he was a genuine human being (you can never be too careful) with many spiritual elements about him, and this made me feel free to write to him and give him some encouragement. I felt it was my duty as a fellow Casey Townsend.
As I was writing my words of wisdom, I decided to multi-task and do some Myspace stalking. I checked out all of his pictures-most I noticed were him with his band and his beloved guitar. He had one photo of himself with his guitar that had his full name (Casey Townsend-so I guess minus his middle) photo-shopped on it. I had a similar photo of myself on my Myspace page with my green dress on that I had photo-shopped my name onto as well. I decided to mention this to him in a photo comment in which I said: “Hey, I have a photo of me that is just like this one!”
This baffled him greatly so he went to my page to check out the picture that I was talking about. As he pondered it with his eyes, he thought, “Why did she put my last name on her picture???” And then it hit him and he scrunched his brows and said quietly but intensely: “Her last name is Townsend too?!”
After finding out this piece of information he saw why I went to all the trouble to write him the first letter to make myself known to him.
He must have liked my advice and my picture, because he wrote me back a very long message thanking me for taking the time to encourage him and spent some of the page explaining himself a little bit better, that he was not typically a whiner.
This started a marathon of emails. In the beginning, there was maybe one email back and forth per week, then there were two, then three, then it was an almost daily occurrence. I would hurry down to the computer lab at Wright State University in- between my classes to see if this mysterious music man had written me another letter. The lab was always full, so there would be people crammed into the computer chairs next to me, hearing me squeal with laughter at the things that Casey Townsend had written.
In all of that time though, the most amazing thing happened, and that is that it never got romantic. There was not even a hint of romance uttered in typed words by either one of us and that still amazes me to this day. My normal self would have made quick moves to see if this thing was ever going to go anywhere. I had suspicions that he had never had a girlfriend before just from some of the things he had said, but I couldn't wrap my mind around that and I wondered if he would ever bring it up.
He didn't though, and this kind of relieved me.
In one of our emails, he said something about us writing a real letter to each other someday and how cool that would be. He said he wished we could go back to the days of wax sealed letters on parchment, and this gave me an idea...
My roommate had just so happened to have recently ordered a personalized wax seal for herself (she liked random things like that). I think she was at work or something, but I decided that I was going to use it! The seal was her initials: 'J.S.', but when you melted the ink you couldn't really tell-it just looked like a cool design and I hoped he wouldn't notice it. :)
I soaked some paper in coffee and crinkled it up to make a modern-day parchment.
The coolest thing happened next. All of my mail went to my dad's house because I didn't want to go through the hassle of an address change while at school, so I went by to pick up my mail which I usually did once a week. When I got there, there was a letter waiting for me. You can guess who it was from! Mr. Casey Townsend had beaten me to the punch and already sent me a hand-written letter, though it was not wax-sealed. I was preparing to go back to Kenya that December, and I had told him briefly about it. He sent me a check for $60 to help with my trip! Something about seeing his real-life handwriting made me get butterflies in my stomach...
So, that day, I sent off my wax-sealed letter in hopes that it wouldn't seem like a romantic advance and scare him off.
When he got his letter, he wrote me via Myspace to tell me how much he loved it, and of course this made me happy. :) Much later he told me a back story to the wax-sealed-letter that must be shared:
Casey Samuel Townsend has a dear friend named Joel Winstead. Joel is hilarious-most of his comments have sarcasm interlaced and when he and Casey get together its like this ball of creative humor that's so fun to watch.
Mr. Casey decided to confide in Joel that this "other" Casey Townsend had written him a wax-sealed letter. Joel being who he is and knowing that Mr. Casey had not had a girlfriend yet, began a bantering back and forth that went like this:
Joel: "Dude, she totally wants you."
Mr. Casey: "No! No, no, no..."
Joel: "Did she put perfume on it?"
Mr. Casey: "No."
Joel: "Wait, you actually sniffed it!?!?"
Mr. Casey: "Yes."
Joel: "Dude! You want her!"
He didn't admit it that day, but Casey Townsend was starting to think that he might be falling for Casey Townsend.
