James and Rebecca Harvey Courtship

Handed down by:Rebecca Harvey

It is a classic LDS story in many ways, returned missionay and young college girl meet at church school, fall in love, and get married. However there is so much more to know to truly understand how James and I came to be. Like many other married couples we have a "song". The opening line of our song is, "It was no accident, me finding you, someone had a hand in it, long before we ever knew...."I have always felt this way about James, as I look back on our courtship I see how we were swept along by a current as progressed toward marriage, as if we were just willing participants in something that was already happening. This is our story...
When I first met James I was immediately impressed. I thought he was charasmatic, confident and fun. I was in a serious relationship with someone else and I believed that he was "the one" but there were doubts on my part and I ended up breaking things off. I wasn't sure that he had the strength of testimony that I hoped for in my husband. At first James and I were just friends and I admired him. I realized quite unexpectedly that my feelings were stronger when I was in need of a priesthood blessing for an illness. My roommates called the apartment that James and his friends lived in and asked if someone could come to give me a blessing. As I lay in bed feeling awful, I realized that I was secretly hoping that James would be one of the two to come. When he walked in the room I felt total relief. I just knew that I was in capable hands. I also felt butterflies??
The next day a group of us crammed into a rented suburban and drove the long drive to my parents house in San Diego. It was our Spring Break and we planned a fun trip including Disneyland, the beach and Mexico. We decided that we would drive through the night and take turns driving so we could get there quickly and maximize our fun. At one point it was dark and we hit a snow storm. James was at the wheel and I was sitting in the back, right behind him. Once again I felt safe knowing he was in control. The strangest thing happened, as I was looking at him from behind, I saw him as a father driving his family along. It wasn't just that I tried to imagine him in that role, I could just "see" it. Sounds strange I know, but it was a powerful feeling.
Our relationship changed on that trip. We ended up sitting beside each other on the drive and suddenly began holding hands without any prior disscussion about our feelings for each other. It just felt so natural! While on the trip we grew closer and closer and had long talks about what we wanted out of life. I was starting to become very attatched to James and when we went back to college life things progressed quickly. We spent as much time together as possible. I fell in love with his intelligence, strength of character, rock solid testimony, sense of fun and work ethic. His good looks, height and musical talents were just icing on the cake! I knew he was the one for me. I have clear memories of finding him in the library, bent over a book, looking very studious and handsome.
He didn't ask me to marry him during a romantic walk on the beach, or some other such place. It was in the darkness of a movie theater, before the movie began. I knew it was coming we had already talked about it, I just didn't know when. As we waited for the movie to begin James began to perform the classic magic trick of pulling a coin from my ear. He had done it many times before and I think he thought he was good at it. He showed me the quarter, then made it disappear, as he pulled it from my ear I saw that it was a ring. He asked me to marry him and of course I said yes.
As I write this story our rambunctious boys are playing tackle football in the hallway, it's only a matter of time before one of them gets hurt. Our daughter is collecting pretty leaves and arranging them in vases to set around the house. Our darling three year old is torturing our kitten and I am happy. On our one year anniversary I had the inside of James's wedding band engraved with another line from "our song" it reads, "Heaven smiling down on us" I believe that is true. We have had our share of life's trials and I am sure there are more to come. The security that James brought me in the beginning continues to be there, he is always there to tell me things will turn out alright. It has been 14 years now and as I think of all we have been through together my heart is full of love.