Kaelin Edwards - This Kind of Love: The Overwhelming Power of Promises, Patience, and Faith

Over the past four years, weve opened our lives to you via YouTube through our channel, Kaelin and Kyrah. Youve walked with us as weve grown from a couple of teenagers getting married to the parents of two young sons living fifteen hundred miles away from all our friends and family in the midst of a global pandemic. Many of you have laughed with us and cried with us and worried with us. Weve rejoiced and experienced all the ups and downs life has thrown at us. Through it all, weve grown, in every direction, together. Thats what makes us more than just a community. The two of us feel like youve become members of our family.

Around the time we did our first storytime video, we started talking about writing a book. Back then, we thought wed write about how we met and fell in love, all leading up to our dream wedding. We planned to weave our Christian faith into this narrative, especially emphasizing how we waited to have sex until marriage. We planned to call the book Worth the Wait, which seemed like the perfect fit at the time. The book would build up to the moment we said, I do, and close with us headed off into our happily ever after.

A funny thing happened on our way to writing that book, and that funny thing is called life. Six months after we were married, we found out Kyrah was pregnant. The birth of our son Karter changed us more than wed ever thought possible. We were forced to grow up fast after becoming parents. Adding a newborn to the other challenges we faced as a young Christian couple trying to figure out our place in this worldIm surprised we kept it all together. Theres no manual for dealing with the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood. Thats why, when our second son, Kaiser, came along just over a year later, the two of us knew we were no longer the people who had planned to write a fairy-tale romance. We also knew you wanted more than that from us. You deserved the unfiltered truth. Our happily ever after was not the climax of our story, but the beginning. What we have learned about each other and ourselves since we said, I do, has completely transformed us, and continues to do so day after day.

And thats the journey we once again invite you to take with us through the pages of this book. We will take you deeper than we ever could online as you learn the inside story of both the struggles and the victories we never felt completely comfortable sharing on YouTube. The story you are about to read isnt always pretty, but thats the beauty of it. Life never goes the way we expect. Weve learned that the more life has gone off script, the more we have had to rely upon God, who is always at work. This story you are about to read is also unfinished because our little family is still a work in progress. As you read the journey weve taken together thus far, please know that we cant wait to see where God will take us next. Looking back, its hard to believe that it all started outside a portable classroom at Earl Warren Junior High School in Bakersfield, California.