It didn't occur to A.J. Green to flirt with Erin Cawthorne the first time they met.
They were both on the staff at Frontier Ranch Young Life Camp in Buena Vista, Colo., in summer 2006. The team gathered in Dallas one weekend before the camp, most of them having not met before, and it was then that he and Erin chatted.
The first time I met my future spouse:
She says: “I thought he was really funny. He was really engaging.”
He says: “I thought she was another one of those Georgia girls.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I was really excited and I would say it was really stressful until after we were married.”
He says: “I was pretty relaxed. Well, I was kind of cranky that morning because I didn’t get a good night’s sleep because someone lost a veil.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “You have to talk about things. That doesn’t mean you have to talk about them right away because sometimes you need time to process. In the seasons of our marriage where we were too frustrated or too busy to talk to each other were the hardest ones.”
He says: “You both can disagree, both not be wrong and by default one person gets their way and nobody’s at fault and it’s not malicious. Look at marriage as a calling and not a choice, and that means you don’t get to get called out of it.”
"I didn't think anything of it," A.J. says. "I literally was just like, 'Well, this is fun.'"
Back home in Little Rock, a week before leaving for Colorado, he was stopped in his tracks by her photo on his refrigerator, just a small one with a short biography, in the midst of photos and biographies of all the other team members.
"It was sudden. I just thought, 'I want to get to know her. I just want to see what happens,'" he says.
At Frontier Ranch, Erin worked with a group of high school students responsible for cleaning toilets. A.J. did skits and entertainment.
"I sang on the stage," says Erin, who lived in Greenville, S.C. "In between songs, I would be backstage watching him be funny. And then vice versa while he was changing clothes to do the next character or whatever and I was on stage leading the songs."
The setting was perfect for banter.
"We started to flirt with each other," she says. "Then he started writing me letters and putting them in my mailbox. ... I would go check my mail, and there would be a cute little letter. Sometimes they would just be like, 'Hey, hope you're having a great day,' and sometimes it would be longer about what he was doing."
There wasn't time for dating during their three-week camp session, though they did find time to have a milkshake together in the snack bar.
"The high school girls I was working with were sitting like one table over laughing at us the whole time, so it wasn't like a romantic thing, but we do say that was our first date," Erin says.
By the time camp was over they knew they wanted to see each other outside the camp in the mountains of Colorado. A few weeks after they returned home, A.J. took some kids from Little Rock to a camp in Asheville, N.C., an hour and a half from where Erin lived. He went to see her a week later when that camp was over.
A.J. was exhausted from camp festivities, and Erin, who had been anticipating his visit, was disappointed.
"We would be watching TV, and I would look over, and he would be asleep," she says.
Erin had already bought her tickets so she moved forward with plans to go to Little Rock a few weeks later, though she had already decided she would tell him she didn't want to see him again.
A.J. was well aware his trip to see her hadn't gone well.
"I had decided, you know what? I do like this girl, and I'm going to set this up where it's going be hard for her to say that she doesn't want to date me anymore," A.J. says.
He took her to a high school for lunch with some of the kids he worked with.
"All these kids were like, 'Oh, we're so glad you're here!'" Erin says.
They attended another youth event, spent time with his friends and went to his grandmother's house for pie.
Erin had flown into the Memphis airport to save money, and as A.J. drove her back for her flight home, she stuck to her guns. She told him she had a nice time but she didn't think they should pursue a relationship. A.J. asked if they could think and pray about it for a week and talk again before making it final, and she agreed.
"I walked into the Memphis airport after he dropped me off and I started weeping. I was so upset and I didn't know why I was upset," she says.
Within days, Erin knew she had made a mistake and called to tell him so. He was relieved to hear from her but insisted they wait the full week to make sure.
They visited each other every month or so after that, and talked on the phone so long many nights that one or the other would fall asleep.
For Valentine's Day 2007, A.J. was in South Carolina. He gave Erin a pair of fuzzy pink boots that he had made, and when she tried them on one felt scratchy inside. What she worried might be a left-behind needle was actually an engagement ring.
A.J. and Erin were married on Sept. 22, 2007, in Columbus, Ga.
Erin is regional administrator for the Young Life Ozark Bayou Region. A.J. is director of family ministries at St. Andrew's Church.
They were assigned again to Frontier Ranch Camp in 2008, before their children Simeon, 8, and Agnes, 5, were born. They were to go again this summer, but plans for that trip have been canceled because of the pandemic.
"We were excited to go back with our kids," Erin says. "It's a special place for us."
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High Profile on 05/24/2020