Last love can start in many different places and for Scott and Michelle Gamble it started as a friendship.
Scott, the Pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, and Michelle were attending Concordia University in Edmonton in 2004. Michelle was a year ahead of Scott, and he was “young and naive.”
“She in her worldly wisdom came in and wooed me…maybe I am exaggerating,” he laughed.
They actually met through his sister, as they were both studying in a math class together. They began hanging out in the same circle of friends.
“She went on a ski trip with me and my family before we were dating, so she got to know my parents, and she saw me run into a tree,” he recalls.
Eventually, the two went on a mission trip together to Indigenous communities in coastal B.C. in 2005.
One evening during this they went for a midnight swim and then stayed up watching movies.
“I awkwardly fumbled out some incoherent ‘do you want to be my girlfriend?’” he recalls. “She mumbled some other incoherent reply, and I stumbled back in the wee morning hours to my dorm bed. The rest was history.”
The couple became inseparable during their college experience, and the year that Scott graduated, they were married on June 21, 2008. They had a lakeside wedding in Penticton.
Michelle went on to do an after degree in education. Interestingly enough, their daughter was born four years later and took that date.
“It has been 13 years of happy bliss.”
He says being friends before can help forge a strong relationship.
“We hung out before with a solid group of a dozen other people and it was really the bedrock of our relationship. We were at Christian University, but it wasn’t like a bible school, so faith was really at the heart of how we know each other, that deep central values. We were still able to hang out as friends and grow and develop that well into a healthy relationship,” he said.
When asked what the secret was, he offered advice he had heard from somewhere else, with the caveat that he is not sure if Michelle would agree.
“Remember that your spouse is not your enemy.”
