Mark and Sasha

"FINE! Fine God!"

Returning to the States was bittersweet. The first thing I did once back was I invited my mom and brother over to my apartment to hear about my trip...but they had to bring an IN-N-OUT Burger with them. Oh, it was good! It was also nice to see my family, but when I started to show them pictures from my trip I started to really miss Ukraine.

The funniest part was when the first picture of Sasha came up. My mom asked who she was, and I jokingly said, "That's Sasha! I'm gonna marry her!" Sometimes I say things that come back to bite me later in life. Even though I said it as a joke my mom got this weird look on her face.

Seriously, I never dreamed that anything would happen between us. I am generally very realistic and usually shoot down the idea of a relationship at the first sign of difficulty. In fact, years ago I swore that I would never be in a long distance relationship. Every person I knew that was in them was miserable, and they never seemed to work out. To be completely honest, every girl I had ever asked out on a date has told me no, and I certainly didn't see how trying something with someone on the other side of the earth was going to be any different.

Boy was I in for a surprise!

I still can't explain it, but every morning I would wake up thinking about Sasha. All day long I would be thinking about Sasha. Every night I would fight to go to sleep, but all I could do was think about Sasha. It was driving me crazy! I seriously thought that I was going insane! It was completely ridiculous, but I couldn't stop it. I knew virtually nothing about her, but for some reason I had this deep attraction to her and an intense desire to find out who she was.

At this point I was still of the opinion that I was crazy and would never see her again. Not to mention, she did not have email or easy internet access; as well, the standard phone rate to call Ukraine is $2.33 for one minute. So I had no reasonable way to contact her anyway. So most of the time when I got these feelings I would just stop and start praying for Sasha... I spent a lot of time praying for her! I would pray for her family, her ministry in Perevalnoya, her friends, her church, her personal life and pretty much anything else I was thinking might be important to her. I figured that if I was going to waste my time thinking about her then I might as well put it to good use lifting her up in pray to our Lord. The only problem was that the more I did this the more I longed to talk to her and find out what God was doing in her life.

As the days passed, my feelings became more and more intense for her. This of course made me more and more angry at myself. I had been asking for God to kill my feelings for her since it was completely impossible to have a relationship with her, but things only got worse.

Finally... I snapped!

On October 4th I woke up early instantly thinking about Sasha, and I was having this crazy emotional surge. It almost felt like a really pleasant panic attack. My whole body was shaking. It was this weird mixture of wanting to see Sasha and complete anger at myself for not making it stop. Then thrown on top of it was this terrifying fear that maybe God actually wanted me to pursue her. That made me even more angry to think that he might just possibly want me to do something so completely insane and impossible.

I jumped into the shower to try and cool off and started to pray about it (I do my best praying in the shower ha ha!). Again, I started to pray that God would just kill my feelings, but the next thing I knew I was literally yelling at God at the top of my lungs!

"FINE! Fine God! You want me to do it?! Fine! I'll do it! This is crazy and stupid, but if you want me to do it I will. If I have to move to Ukraine, then fine! If I have to blow my life savings on plane tickets and phone bills, then fine! If you really want me to pursue this woman then I will, but YOU have to give us a way to contact each other! BUT! If you don't want me to get involved with Sasha then you need to just KILL these feelings RIGHT NOW!!!"

Um... yeah... you need to be careful about yelling at God...

I hopped out of the shower feeling great! I figured the whole thing was over. After all, there was no way that God would want me chasing a woman sitting on the other side of the world... right?

I dried off, put my robe on, and went to check my morning emails like I do every day. As I looked at my new emails I saw a message with the subject title "letter" from Александра Захарова, and I thought it was spam. Just as I was about to delete it I suddenly realized that it was Sasha's full name spelled in Russian! I can't even begin to describe the adrenaline rush that surged through my body.

I stopped, said a quick prayer, "ok God... let's do it" and opened the email...

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