I give up... (Love Story part 1)

Well, I have been reading several of my friends' love stories on their blogs. I tried to put off writing my own - not because I don't like it, only because everyone else was doing it.

I finally decided to just go for it. So here is the first installment of "Josh and Shiloh's Love Story"

I was a freshman at ACU in the fall of 2000. Josh was a Senior Youth Ministry major that year and Senior Class President. In the first few weeks of school applications came out for Freshman Action Counsel (FAC) and my friend Jackie Beth and I both wanted to apply. When it came time for interviews I had a small problem. I was supposed to be back in Austin for an appointment with my neurologist Dr. Gupta. He was going to be preforming a small procedure called a nerve block on the occipital nerves in my head (I have occipital neuralgia headaches and this was supposed to help). So I had to call the FAC committee and beg to reschedule my interview.

The interview committee consisted of several upper classmen members of SA - including Josh Jones. I remember going in for the interview, being nervous and meeting Josh. He says he remembers thinking that I was cute and also confusing me with my friend Jackie Beth.

That is most of the contact I remember having with Josh until the Spring of that year when we both were giving counselor positions for Leadership Camps. Josh had graduated in May but did not have a youth ministry job lined up yet so he decided to work camps on last summer. We had weekly training meetings and a counselor retreat. Jan Meyer - one of the camp directors, really likes to use people as examples in training. She knew Josh since he had been a counselor before and had worked in the camps office all year. So, when it came to the talk about don't date during camps she said something like this "Now Shiloh, you are going to think that Josh is really cute playing with all the kids, and he's going to be a great youth minister. And Josh, you are may think that Shiloh is cute, BUT you are not allowed to date during camps". I think that I just turned red during this whole conversation. Josh says that he looked over and thought "Yeah, she is pretty cute".

So that began our inside joke of saying that we were going to date when camps were over. Our first ever picture together is when I was at Taco Bueno with Jackie Beth and some other friends and Josh was there with his parents and his brother. We were talking and decided to pretend we were on a date and take a picture together. I'm not really sure why we did that, but it was funny.

During that summer we actually never worked directly with each other. I worked KidQuest and Learning2Lead and Josh worked MPulse and Kadesh. We would all hang out on the weekends and I would go say hi and give him a hug in the campus center when we passed each other. He told me later that was when he first really started to like me was when I would give him hugs - apparently I have really good hugs.

All of the Staff from the summer of 2001


At the end of the summer we had a BBQ at Jerry Strader's house to celebrate the summer. Josh got to keep the giant Kadesh sign and asked all the counselors to sign it for him. I had also written him a letter saying goodbye and good luck finding a youth ministry job etc. It turns out he wrote me a letter also. After that we parted ways - I went home for a few weeks before school started again in August and he moved in with his parents in Arlington to work as a youth ministry resident at his home church Pleasant Ridge.

More coming soon.....

The fake "first date" at Bueno


A picture of Josh at MPulse ( I hate this picture - it is creepy)


Josh and the girls on one of our weekends off