Raelynn and I met on the first day of our freshman year of college in quite an unusual way. We were standing outside the door to our first class of the day - speech - when she came up to me and said, "Are you Amber?" You can imagine my surprise. I had never seen her before! "Yes," I replied in what I'm sure was a very timid manner. It turns out that my boyfriend at the time, Ben, had pulled through the McDonalds drive through (where she worked then) a few nights before classes began. Ben had gone to school with her before moving to my high school. He told her that I was really nervous about starting college, and he asked her to introduce herself if he came across a "really short, blonde girl". Obviously, Raelynn spotted the "really short, blonde girl" right away and did as Ben requested. She and I ended up having at least a couple classes together, and we quickly became good friends. She was the total extrovert, striking up conversations with everyone she met. I, in turn, was the total introvert, doing my best to fade into the background. So we complemented each other well. She made it her mission to bring me out of my shell, and she did a pretty good job at it (though I've since shrunk back into it, I fear). We were always doing crazy things when we were out and about together. For example, it was a rule that if we saw any guy wearing a cowboy hat, we had to approach him and sing, "Cowboy Take me Away" to him. Embarrassing now, but at the time it was fun. The two of us had theme Wednesdays at school, which were always SO fun! There was mis-match day, 80s day, little kid day, etc. We had fun singing karaoke together on weekends and breaking social norms when we could.
I'm a dork, and she's a big dork. : P
Mis-match day
One of our many Wal-Mart adventures
Just being us
During our sophomore year in college, Raelynn went to study abroad in Canterbury, England for a semester with a group of students from the college who were going. I kept up with her by reading her articles in the school newspaper about the trip (we both worked on the newspaper staff). In each of the columns she mentioned other fellow Crowder College students who were on the trip, too, and the name "Nathan Stump" always stood out like a sore thumb. I remember thinking, "The poor girl who marries that guy and gets stuck with that name!" Ha! When she returned from England the second semester, Raelynn and I started up a weekly Bible study for Crowder students. We'd meet every Thursday (or was it Wednesday?) in the library's conference room, and we'd discuss a different topic each week. It just so happened that our weekly Bible study fell on Valentine's Day, and Raelynn had invited Nathan and his sister to come to that particular week's study. Thus, I met Nathan on Valentine's Day 2002, and as we all know, I became that "poor girl who married that guy and got stuck with that name!" With my maiden name being "Wright", I like to tell people that I was Wright all my life, and now I'm Stumped for the rest of it. : P
My honey in England
After we finished junior college, Raelynn and I went our separate ways. I went to a near-by 4 year college, majoring in English/creative writing, and she went to Lubbock, TX to a missionary school called AIM. She spent 2 1/2 years doing missionary work in Japan upon completing her courses there and has since been to various other places, too. These days, she works as a campus minister in Arizona and still does missionary work here and there in other countries.
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