I’ve been dating my boyfriend Jeremiah for about a year and a half now. However, we only spent six months (a wonderful six months!) of that time together before he left for Basic Training at Fort Benning in Georgia. Once he got to Basic Training, it was three months of letter-writing, three months of 20-minute phone calls (30 minutes if we were lucky…an hour if we were really, really lucky) and three months of praying for his safety and his strength. I will always remember the first time he was able to call me. It had already been about a month since he’d left, and I hadn’t heard from him since then. My mind is the type to run rampant with rather imaginative scenarios of everything that could be going wrong, and this whole month had given my overactive imagination a little too much to work with. One night, I was keeping myself occupied by cleaning my room and listening to music on my phone. The music stopped playing, and it made me mad because the song was just about to get to the good part. I moved toward my phone, and I saw his name and his picture on the screen. Picking up the phone and answering it was kind of a blur, but when I heard his voice, such a sense of relief flooded through my body that I just started crying. He was alive! Exhausted, yes, but alive! Through the tears I could hear him saying, “Kat? Are you OK?” I could also hear him laughing a bit. “Katherine, I need you to talk to me.” After a little bit, I composed myself, and we were finally able to have a conversation. It was the shortest 30 minutes of my life, but I loved every second of it.

Things had been really hard for me since he left. I was approaching school and homework with a halfhearted effort. I wasn’t enjoying volleyball season as much as I should have, mainly because I spent 98 percent of the time wishing he were there to watch the games. I was isolating myself, not really talking to my friends or my family. Whenever the subject of long-distance came up, I just wanted to turn tail and run. It just hurt too much to talk about it, and I felt that no one I was around understood what I was going through.

However, about two months into the long distance relationship, I realized that I didn’t have to live that way. After living in this slightly depressive state, my mom helped me see that this wasn’t the way I should be spending my senior year of high-school. Yes, what I was going through was awful, she said, but it was also very good, for both me and Jeremiah. At the time, I didn’t really want to hear it: I just wanted to live my life and mope around in peace. But after a while, what she had said to me clicked. She was right: this wasn’t the way I wanted to live out my senior year. And this separation, though heart-wrenching at times, was good for the both of us. Through this, both Jeremiah and I were given the opportunity to learn so much about ourselves and the world around us, and then share with the other what we’d learned.

Without him here, we obviously didn’t spend every moment together, and while at times I did miss that, there were times when I was grateful to be on my own. The beginning of senior year is stressful enough: applying to schools, finishing up the good ole ACTs and SATs, staying on top of grades, etc. Without Jeremiah here, I was able to spend my time focusing on and preparing for those things. I was also able to spend time with my friends, which I really came to value very much as the months went by because we’d all be going to different schools after we graduated.

Now, I’m not meaning to sound insensitive. It’s not like on the day I decided to focus on the positives instead of the negatives that I lost all feelings I had for my guy. That did not happen. But I wasn’t depending on him to be my happiness anymore. I wasn’t depending on him to pick me up when I was down. I couldn’t run to him with my problems. Around this time, my eyes were opened to what was wrong in my life: I was depending on another person to bring me happiness and strength and love when that was God’s purpose in my life all along. I had been too blinded by self-pity to recognize the One who is always there to hold me, to help me, and to love me unconditionally. I had no reason to feel so alone in this, but God and His amazing grace reached down and lifted me out of my pit. With God’s help, I also came to realize that if I spent my time depending on another human being to be my sole source of happiness and strength, I would be so incredibly disappointed over and over again, simply because that is so much responsibility to place on another person. People fail us. People disappoint us. God doesn’t fail us. God doesn’t disappoint us. That truth has been shown to me time and time again in this long-distance relationship.

My relationship with God isn’t the only thing that’s been strengthened over this time. My relationship with Jeremiah is stronger than ever, and I’m so grateful for God blessing me with this man. After Basic Training, Jeremiah got his phone back, and text messages were no longer a thing of the past. Daily communication was something that I had really taken for granted, and now that we have it again, I treasure it so much.

Through long distance, our communication with each other has improved more than it would if we were both in the same place. It’s harder to communicate well over the phone, but with a little extra work and consideration on both sides, we make it work. We’ve also been able to learn how to encourage one another and truly be there for the other person, and we’ve learned to be independent.

Another thing I have learned from this relationship is how to “go with the flow,” which is something I still have trouble with sometimes. When Jeremiah and I try to make plans on when to see each other next, it’s next to impossible to know if they’re going to go, well, as planned. For someone who loves scheduling and planning, it was really hard for me to learn that I wouldn’t be able to always plan out the next time we got to be together, simply because what we had planned could fall into place or fall into pieces within five minutes. But this distance has taught us to roll with the punches, accept things as they come, and to hold onto hope.

The long distance has helped strengthen our relationship in so many ways. I have learned so much from this relationship that I wouldn’t have been able to learn if I were on a different path. Long distance has taught me trust. It has taught me independence. It has taught me how to let go of the things that I cannot control, and to be grateful for the things I have. I have learned to lean on God and to depend on Him to be my strength as I make my way through this life. Though long distance is hard, it is good. Oh, what joy it brings me to know that this distance doesn’t last forever.