Jeff Lucas: My embarrassing first love stories

The author and teaching pastor doesn’t want to go back to his first faith. But his first love is another matter

In a cardboard box, locked away safely, an elastic band secures about 50 letters that my wife Kay and I exchanged when we first started dating. We hope that nobody will find them until we are both dead; if they are discovered before, the embarrassment would likely kill us. 

Decades before email, this pair of lovestruck teenagers poured out their hearts to each other in oodles of gushy, romantic prose. But it’s not just the saccharine sentences that cause me to blush; as relatively new Christians, we were determined to put Jesus first in our relationship. That meant our rather cheesy epistles were peppered with religious sentiments: “I love you so much, darling, but of course I love Jesus more”, and: “I am so grateful that the Lord brought us together, hallelujah!”