Hi everyone! Leslie tells me a lot about you guys and has been begging me to tell you our story from my point of view for quite some time now, and I've been telling her, "Just hand me your laptop," and today was the day she actually did it. So, here I am, and here it is. And now that I have a computer in front of me and am being asked to write a story about real life, I'm not entirely sure where to start...
Let's start at the beginning though, that seems like a good place. In 2011, I was in 6th grade at Boyds Creek Elementary School (not Boyd's Creek. There is no apostrophe. Long story, don't worry about it, I'll get into it another time if you'd like me to though). I had been going to Boyds Creek Elementary since I was seven and remember hardly anything from before 6th grade, and there's a very good reason for that. See, in 6th grade, there was this girl that I remember very distinctly being the cutest girl I had ever seen. But, being an awkward and shy 6th grade boy, I decided NOT to talk to her. At all.
BUT. I really wanted to talk to her. I talked about her all the time. I also thought about her quite a bit because she was just this little angel, and I wanted more than anything to get to know her. But you know, the whole shy 6th grader thing kind of stopped me from doing that.
Anyways, I decided one day I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. I did what any bold and brave middle schooler would do... I told my friend. Not her, my friend. Everybody knows that friends are the best at keeping secrets, right? Especially when they are other eleven year old boys who become informed someone has a crush on someone else.
Fast forward a little bit and I get asked by someone else who was not the one initially trusted with this information, "You like Leslie?"
Now, you can see where the concern from eleven year old me would come in because I didn't tell this person about my crush on Leslie. I made it a point, actually, to tell only one person, since it's very easy to keep a close eye on things when only one other person is involved. My friend, however, thought maybe it would be better to trust other people with the information as well because if everyone knows, then it can never be forgotten about (That's important later by the way).
The cool part of all of it was the fact that Leslie was included in the aforementioned everyone and thus, also knew about my crush on her. This was very bad. At least, I thought it was.
I was never going to actually tell her about it; I hadn't thought that far ahead. I was just going to continue to have a crush on her until I thought of the next part of the plan. Now I had to figure out a step 2, and in my panic my solution was... continue not talking to her. Smart thinking, right? (Well, I should say I tried talking to her once, and it went pretty poorly because I kind of just followed her around the playground for half an hour. It wasn't very exciting for her).
It is now time to mention that I was going to be moving at the end of 2011 and knew this months ahead of time. This was also really bad news because who was going to have a crush on Leslie after I left?
So, combine the fact that I was moving with the fact that I was too shy to talk to her, and you get an interesting last semester where nothing happens the way you want it to. I vividly remember some of my last days for that semester and wishing, more than anything, that I had actually just talked to her because now, I'd never get the chance to. I was moving away, and I'd never get to see her again. I was truly devastated.
But, regardless of if I felt devastated or not, I moved away. I thought life would go back eventually, but after weeks turned into months, and then into years, it did not. During this process of weeks turning into months, I found Leslie on Instagram. She was actually one of the first twenty people I followed (clearly I never forgot about her). I actually remember reaching out to her somehow asking if she remembered me. She says she has no memory of this happening, but it definitely did. Anyways, despite reaching out to her, life went on without her. I even told my new friends about this girl, but life still went on.
Two years later, my family moved back to Tennessee, and I actually finished out my 8th grade year at Boyds Creek. You'll never guess who I ran into again...
Not Leslie. She moved to a different school. But, I did run into old friends, and she was the first person I asked about after not seeing her at school the first couple of days. They were the ones who told me the news that she had changed schools. After hearing this, I think I was more devastated than when I first moved away. (Don't worry the story gets better eventually). When I heard this news, I began to accept the fact that she was just a middle school crush and slowly but surely continued on with life. High school started, and every now and then, I'd see a post of hers at Pigeon Forge High School and think, "I wonder if we'll ever happen to bump into each other at the grocery store one day." We never did.
High school came and went. Then college started, then college ended, and life was at a very different point than it was when I was eleven. I had dropped out of college to pursue a full-time filmmaking career and was working at my home church making videos. Leslie had become but a memory in middle school Isaac's forgotten mind. It is at this time I will add that I made sure to like any post of hers I saw on Instagram. Not because I was trying to get her attention, I just had always done that, and she was always important to me.
In September 2021, the church I was working at was ending a season of forty days of prayer and fasting. As a staff member, I was there in the final 24 hours praying and fasting and bringing the season to a close. Each of the staff was there praying for personal things, corporate things, and all sorts of other things. I had just come out of a season of striving for a relationship. I had been trying and trying to find the one but was getting extremely frustrated and burnt out from trying so hard. My prayer the whole fast was for two things: for God to open some major doors with filmmaking and for God to show me my wife. As the final 24 hours were ticking by, I was probably in the church building 12 or more hours praying for those two things specifically. This is absolutely crucial to Leslie and I's story. We would not be married today without God bringing us together, and it was truly none other than Him who did that.
Well the fast ended, and I left it feeling very encouraged and excited for what the future held. I remember praying very specifically, "God, take this from me, it's Yours. I've been striving for so long but I trust You and if You say I'm not ready yet, then I am not ready. Do with my relationships as You will." And from there, it took off.
See, there is immense power in prayer, whether you believe that or not. God longs to have a relationship with us. He's all powerful and all knowing, but He's also all loving. He genuinely wants to be a Father to us, not just a ruler. He wants to sit down and have conversations with us, and teach us things as we grow up, and hear about what's on our hearts, and tell us about what's on His. That's what prayer is: conversation with God. And that's what I was doing when I prayed that prayer. I was speaking with Him, saying I trusted Him with even the biggest thing in my life at the time. And, like the loving Father He is, He spoke back.
On September 17th, 2021, just three days later, I was sitting in my parents' basement playing video games with a friend of mine when I got a notification from Instagram on my phone. I just happened to see @lesliejessie7 out of the corner of my eye and had to do a double take. At this point, I hadn't actually read the notification. I had just caught that it had something to do with Leslie. At first, I figured she just liked one of my posts or maybe that Instagram was letting me know she had posted for the first time in a while like it sometimes does. It was neither of these things. She had sent me a direct message completely out of the blue. The message essentially said, "Hey I know we haven't talked in ten years, but how are you?"
I almost fell out of my chair. I actually had to stop playing the game for a few minutes, and my friend on the other end of the headset had to check on me because I got so distracted. I couldn't believe my eyes. Why would she ever direct message me? Did she want me to make a video? Or maybe she just wanted to make friends? I almost couldn't believe it at all. In my flustered daze, I typed up a response and sent it to her and then waited the longest 30 minutes of my life for her to respond. When I took my eyes off my phone and set it down, I thought, "No way... Is she the one? It's her, isn't it God?"
You can probably imagine how excited I was when I found out the answer was yes. I went and told my family about it before they had even met her, and to my surprise, they were totally on board with the idea that she would be my wife too.
We pretty quickly planned our first hangout. We met the following week at a coffee shop. It was only like 4 days later too. We sat there and talked for so long that the coffee shop actually closed and kicked us out, and that just simply wasn't enough time, so we immediately planned our next hangout... the very next day. We went to Dave & Busters, and it was the best not-a-date first date ever. (The coffee shop wasn't a date. it was just a hangout. Technically Dave & Busters wasn't a date either, but don't worry about it). After we finished, we sat and talked in my car for a long time. We just couldn't get enough of each other. Eventually, I smoothly worked in a way to ask her on an official date, to which she agreed.
From there, we went on our first date and got to know more and more about each other. We talked about where life had taken us in the 10 years we spent apart. This is where she informed me that the reason she reached out to me was because she saw that I had liked some of her posts and because she remembered I had a crush on her so many years before. (See? I told you everyone knowing about it would come back later.) Shortly after, we started actually dating. Shortly after that, I informed her I knew from the day we first started talking that I knew we'd get married one day. To my surprise, this didn't scare her away. As the months went on, we began to talk more and more about our future together and where we saw God taking us. We both agreed that it meant marriage.
Before we decided to get married in February 2022, we were planning for July, but God is definitely good at showing us that He's really the One in control, no matter how much planning we do.
In order to get married in February, a few things had to fall into place first. What needed to happen was finding a house, getting a job, and getting some money to start out on. Well, within a week of making our decision to get married in February, a VERY cheap house popped up, I found a job, and my tax return came in. This was God's way of saying He approved of our decision and was in full support, no matter what the rest of the world may say or think. Was it fast? Of course, but It was God-ordained and God-driven. And if that's the case, nothing can stop it.
Leslie and I have now been married for over 3 months, and are excited to see what the future holds. She and I are both fully chasing what God has in store for our lives and can't wait to see what He's got for us next.
Leslie always puts a lesson in these things, so here's a lesson for you: Trust God. That's not always easy, but He seriously knows what's best for you and wants to give you not just what you need but also what you want. He loves you, and He knows you, better than you know yourself. For me, that didn't come quickly, easily, or without me trying to take things into my own control MANY times. I was trying for so long to find the one for me. It took me finally giving up on doing it myself, saying I can't do it, but God can, and trusting that it would be true. See, there is a difference between saying something and believing it. You can't trust God if you don't believe He's going to do it. So trust God in all things, and believe that He is going to stay true to His Word. Talk to Him. Get to know Him. He's so much closer than you might even think.
Ok thank you for reading. I write scripts for fun, so that's why this is so long. I also make movies and videos and other short films. You should check them out if you haven't seen one yet. They are all at www.isaackandel.com. I also write and produce custom videos from scratch, so definitely reach out if you've got one you need made! I'll see you there :)
-Isaac Kandel, Leslie's husband
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