This story keeps getting weirder, so I might as well start writing it down.
I was in Grand Central. You know how Grand Central is — loud, beautiful, full of people who are very much going somewhere. I was not really going anywhere. A guy came up to me, said hi, and asked if I wanted to join him and his friend on a ferry ride around the city. He had an accent I couldn’t place at first. (Germany, it turned out. He’d been in the country for a few weeks.)
For about thirty seconds I genuinely considered it. The city was glittering, the ferry sounded fun, and there was something disarming about him. But the part of my brain that has heard every true crime podcast ever made tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me that getting on a boat with two strange men I had known for ninety seconds was not, in fact, an adventure. It was a podcast episode. I said no, said it was nice meeting him, and walked away.
I figured that was the end of it.
It was not the end of it.
That night, somehow, he found my Instagram. He had my first name and the name of my school. That’s it. I don’t know what dark internet magic he used but the man had clearly Sherlock-Holmes’d his way through whatever scraps I’d given him, and there he was in my DMs asking if I wanted to get coffee the next day.
I couldn’t. But we kept texting. And texting. And then more texting. He was funny and curious and kept asking real questions, the kind that make you feel slightly seen by a person who, a week ago, did not exist in your life.
A few weeks later I had to go back to New York for a funeral. The timing was awful, in the way that funerals always are. I mentioned it to him in passing, and it turned out — of course — that the day of the funeral was his very last day in the country before he flew home to Germany. He wanted to meet up.
We made a plan. He overslept and missed it. I laughed because at that point what else can you do.
But then he showed up at my house. Just appeared, sheepish, holding a bag of snacks and his guitar. He gave both of them to me. The guitar. The actual guitar he had been traveling with. I tried to say no. He insisted. Then he flew back to Germany the next day.
He’s been back home for a while now, and a couple of weeks ago he reached out again. He wants to see me. The thing is, I’ve been honest with him from pretty early on about why I can’t date him: my faith is the most important thing in my life, and I’m not willing to build something serious with someone who doesn’t share it. He doesn’t know Jesus. That’s a line I’m not crossing, no matter how kind he is or how persistent or how good the story sounds.
And then he told me he started reading the Bible. He said he’d get back to me.
I don’t know what to do with any of this. I don’t know if it’s a story about a really nice guy who’s curious about my life, or a story about God doing something I didn’t ask Him to do, or both at once. I’m trying not to grab the steering wheel. I’m trying to just see what happens.
But for now, I have a guitar in my room that doesn’t belong to me, a phone that occasionally lights up with a German number, and a quiet little prayer I keep coming back to: whatever this is, let it be Yours.
We’ll see.