Interest Sparked
At the time when Patrick asked me to go on the date during the summit, I was living in New Jersey, where I had moved to intern with the teen ministry for the summer, and I was having a hard time adjusting. Geographically, I was not fond of New Jersey, and in general it takes some time for me to get warmed up to new places. The roads were so confusing and very different than what I was used to. Being in a new environment and meeting new people isn’t really easy for me, plus I had never lived away from home. After a day spent with the teens I wasn’t ready to go back to the place where I was staying so I drove there but stayed outside. I decided to call Patrick, out of all the people I could have called. I think it was because I felt safe with him; he didn’t live in New York, he didn’t really know me and he’s a friendly guy. I wanted to speak to a guy that I felt wouldn’t take it the wrong way if I called him. I also wanted to be careful about whom I called at such a vulnerable time in my life, and I didn’t think Patrick would judge me. I also called him because I knew he would pick up. Horrible, yes I know.
Patrick picked up his phone and picked up my spirits. He helped me get through my difficult moment by sending me a great scripture to hold on to. The scripture he gave me was Mark 10:29–30:
“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.”
That scripture made me see that my move would be blessed. I had left home literally for the gospel, and I felt good about that. I held on to that for the rest of my time in New Jersey and soon I started to have a wonderful time. By the end of the internship I didn’t really want to leave. God used Patrick in an amazing way, and I’ll never forget it. The way I started to view Patrick began to change in that I saw him as more than “Pat, brother I met in Chicago.” As he helped me know more about God, I began to know him through that lens, and from then on our friendship became more valuable to me and way more important than it had ever been before.
To be perfectly honest, when I moved to New Jersey, I grew very depressed. One day, when I was talking to Patrick after I moved back home, I casually told him that I had been sleeping a lot. He knew something was a little peculiar about that, so he revealed to me that he had suffered with depression for a long time. I immediately got defensive; was he trying to say that I was depressed? I thought, Maybe because he’s depressed he just wants me to be depressed too; maybe he’s doing it to feel better about himself. Being defensive was really just my pride. I knew full well that when I was younger I had seen two or three psychologists because I was “sad,” and most of my doctors concluded that I was dealing with depression.
After my initial hesitation, I opened up to tell him that all of my psychologists knew I was depressed but really hadn’t helped me overcome it. I had been a teenager when all this happened, so to me and my family it was just growing pains, something I would grow out of. I never grew out of it but coped in some very destructive ways. I drank, slept, withdrew from people and had boyfriends who I thought would make me happy instead of feeling this sadness.
The way Patrick described his depression during this conversation, it was like he was describing my life. It was like he knew the deepest parts of me, but they weren’t parts of me; he was talking about himself. Every single deep, hidden feeling Patrick had, I had. It dawned on me that nobody—not even my closest friends and family—knew me the way he did. Nobody had ever understood; only he did. And I hadn’t even known him for that long. Nobody, not even my mother, knew what depression felt like. I began to realize how much depression had always been a part of my life. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, it was there and always had been. That night when I had that conversation with Patrick, there was no denying that he was put in my life for a reason. I couldn’t lose his friendship.
I wondered if maybe this was God putting a potential boyfriend before me. At the time, though, I couldn’t quite see how it would work. I thought, How can two depressed people date? How does that even work? What if we are depressed together? Will we even step outside the house? What if we get married and have kids; they will most likely have depression too, maybe even worse. I thought about all these things before we were even dating, but I had to make sure that I weighed the risks before our friendship grew and we got closer. Here’s the journal entry I wrote after our conversation:
9/23/12
Spoke to Pat last night and we had a very different kind of conversation. It was about depression. I am in a state of depression at the moment and it is hard to cope with. God put him in my life to help me and with him there are no expectations. He’s someone I can be real with and could be my best friend but we both got so many issues, man, or past issues, it just really bonds us. I feel like we’ve known each other for a long time but still he lives in Baltimore lol…So yeah talking to him is so great because it allows me to know myself and my depression and helps me get over it. One of the things he does is encourage one person every day and at the end of the day he’ll write down five positive things that happened during the day. It helps you look more at the bright side of things. Oh, also Pat already knows my struggles and what I need to improve, that’s crazy. There’s no hiding who I am from him at all.