It comes when you least expect it. My love story.

Y’all listen. I was the girl who thought I’d be married at 25.

I met Caleb at 34, and those years of waiting, longing, and holding out hope for my person were full of pain, disappointment, and simply wondering if God had forgotten me.

But God can’t forget us. Everything that we long for is coming, just usually in a different way and a different package than we expect.

In August of 2019, I was in Nashville visiting some friends before heading off to a writing retreat. I was working on a book about being single and hungry, and I was invited to a writers retreat in Kentucky to work on the story. A quick stop in Nashville beforehand allowed me to see some dear friends and get that Nashville foodie fix that I’m always hungry for. A girlfriend and I sat on the back porch drinking a deep red wine, listening to crickets and watching butterflies and breathing in the humid air. I was there. Fully. I was so present. And I loved it. I looked at her and I said, “I feel so connected to my life. I feel here and now.”

Some say, when we are present, we find the presence. 

That night, after years of work on looking at my life and trying to understand why I didn’t know how to simply be in it, I recognized for the first time that I was doing it. Or rather I was being it. There I was. Connected to and in love with my life. In that simple moment, there was nothing that I would have changed. Nothing about my future and nothing about my past. They were irrelevant because everything was happening right now. This was my first real remembered experience of embodiment: of feeling fully connected, aligned, and in love with my life. 

The next morning, I woke up early, got my flat white, and jumped on the road to drive to Kentucky for my retreat. I played Ben Rector and Hunter Hayes and drove through the winding hills and horse farms to the tiniest little town I’d ever been to. The retreat began that night and we opened the weekend with a dinner at the host’s beautiful plantation home.

About an hour into dinner, 2 of the attendees arrived late and walked in together. I assumed they were married, she was wearing a ring and they seemed to be quite friendly. My nature is hospitality so I immediately offered to show them both where the wine and whiskey and food was — so they could get comfortable and settled and acquainted with the group. 

The guy was wearing a blue t-shirt, a baseball cap, and was perhaps the most in-shape human I had ever met. He introduced himself, “I’m Caleb” he said. 

“And I’m Kara,” I said. 

I learned quickly that Caleb and Allison were not married to each other. She was married and he was single and they had simply ridden from the airport together because they had arrived late. The whole group headed out to the farm for a tractor ride and Caleb sat behind me. I shared my whiskey and laughed at a joke he told and we would spend the next three days in Kentucky like magnets, falling in love and being overwhelmed with the other’s presence. He is to this day one of the biggest miracles of my life. Not only because my soul found a home with him, but also because in meeting Caleb I realized a deep truth that we fight in life to believe: These longings take exactly as much time as they take. 

I could not have met Caleb any earlier. And he would say the same.

Friends and strangers would say to me all of the time: You’ll meet him when you least expect it. Oh how I hated that phrase. I was always expecting to meet him! I’d get on a plane, or walk into Starbucks and I would think: Maybe just maybe he’s here! 

But in divine irony, which is the beautiful mystery of faith, I met Caleb at a time when I least expected it. I was there with two of my best girlfriends and had zero expectation that there would be any single men. And truthfully, if I had met Caleb in a bar, I most likely would not have given him the time of day. He wasn’t my “type”. I had always dated skinny artistic dudes with ponytails, and Caleb was an ex-NFL player, Westpoint graduate, and externally looked like someone who I would assume is a meathead and quite cocky. 

He, to be clear, is neither of those things. He is tender (he cried the first night I met him!) and thoughtful and one of the most sensitive and gentle people I know. 

Our souls collided like two dancers in the sky and then it just happened. We fell in love.

What was different about falling in love with Caleb verses any men of my past is that my body always felt peace. I never wondered what I had always wondered: Does he like me? Will he call me? Am I good enough for him? He is good enough for me? The entire experience of joining my life with his was seamless and joyful and even in the fighting — it felt purposeful. 

We know that every love story is different. Every love story is so unique and so complex and full of variables. But what I know without a shadow of a doubt is the body never lies. It cannot. Your body is the best truth teller you have. Many of us have learned to disconnect or misread the signals of our body, but when we come home to her, and learn to trust her divine wisdom, she speaks wisdom and truth. My body felt nothing but peace in choosing Caleb.

There is something I know now, perhaps because our hindsight is always 2020. Caleb was always there. He was in my story all along. He was leaning into his life, as I leaned into mine, and at the right time and in the right way the universe allowed our paths to align. This is the way of deep faith for me. That all things are working for us, not against us. That God (if you call him that) is the great orchestrator of all beauty and all love. And that wherever you are in your story, whether in the longing or in the waiting or even in the fulfillment of what you hope for, it was there all along. 

Photos by the epically talented: Paper Antler