The End (part 11)

The biggest factor that led to the final break-up with JT was other girls.

But not all those other girls that he broke up with me for, or compared me to.

No, it was the Christian girls that I finally got to know. My sophomore year I asserted some independence (finally!) and stopped going to church in Hollywood, and continued going with some of the girls I had become friends with over the summer.

Really getting to know other Christian girls was instrumental in changing me and helping me to see that there was more to being a Christian than believing that there was a God, or just wanting to go to heaven.

They actually had a relationship with God. They read their Bibles and prayed regularly, and looked for ways to apply what they read to their lives. And they included me in their lives, whether it was going out to dinner or taking a roadtrip to a Christian conference.

And there were some things that they believed the Bible said were wrong. Things that JT had told me weren't wrong.

But I learned. And I read. And I believed.

And in the summer after my sophomore year I was at a conference and I realized.

My relationship with JT was not godly. And I wanted to be a godly person.

And so, for the first time, I broke up with him.

But me breaking up with him wasn't quite the end of things.

I thought it was great that we could remain friends, especially since I had been stupid enough to allow my roommate and her boyfriend to talk me into living next door to him.

We still spent quite a bit of time together, and what I didn't realize was that he just expected us to get back together. He really thought that we were going to get married after we graduated, and just thought of all those other girls as little adventures along the way. He had never noticed that while he had talked about marriage over the years, I hadn't.

And when he finally realized that it wasn't happening, then things got ugly.

His moods swung wildly. There were rages where he would curse and yell and slam doors and I'd be afraid he would actually hurt me. There were times he'd become suicidally depressed and be on his knees sobbing in front of me.

He even asked me to go to couples therapy with him.

Even though we were no longer a couple.

I lost weight because I would avoid my apartment, skipping meals and staying away for as long as I could.

And the thing that made him realize that we were really over wasn't me breaking up with him or kicking him out of my apartment, or any of those inconsequential things.

It was Isaac.

*This is part 11 in a series. Wow, I never meant it to get that long! It was about how I became a Christian. Now it has morphed into how I met my husband. I guess this could be part two of how I met him. Read my first impression of him here.