Thirty-six Years and Counting

This week my husband and I celebrated our 36^th wedding anniversary. Our story is a serious God Hunt sighting. Only God could keep us together this long.

The week before our wedding, I looked at my future husband and realized I didn’t have that gooey love feeling that you see in movies. At that moment I wasn’t even sure if I liked the guy enough to spend the rest of my life with him. It was terrifying.

Then I remembered that God had orchestrated our meeting, through a series of dreams I had as a junior and senior in high school that sent me two states away from my family to a tiny college that wasn’t even accredited yet, to meet my future husband.  The dreams didn’t include romantic promise but promises of working side by side to do great things.

I’m laughing right now because I can hear my husband in his home office, which is next to the spare bedroom where I’m working. Working in adjoining offices isn’t new to us. We spent eighteen years working for a church with offices right next to each other, but somehow this is different. No longer having a regular paycheck means we really need to depend on God and each other to make it through each moment. I love it. We have arrived at the place that God promised me thirty-six years ago as I sat in my room trying to decide if it was worth it to go ahead with the wedding.

In the years since that moment, we’ve done some crazy things. We ran a half-way house – living in a tiny one bath, three-bedroom house with three to five guys in various stages of recovery and need. When we finally bought our own home, we continued to have people living with us, adults preparing for mission work, teens who needed a break from their parents and even an eight-year-old whose Mom spent a month in treatment. After several years of that, we decided it was time to adopt and we selected a late-placed, hard-to-adopt child, while we were in the middle of building a new home. The night we moved into our beautiful new home, that I thought would be our forever home, we both looked at each other and said, “We won’t be here long.” Eighteen months later we had sold or stored our furniture, rented out our houses, and bought a twenty-two-foot travel trailer which we parked in my mother-in-law’s driveway while my husband finished seminary. I spent the next sixteen months homeschooling our new child, which lead me to a day when I packed all my worldly goods and was ready to walk away from the marriage. Obviously, we all survived, but it was touch and go for several hours. When my husband finally finished seminary, we moved to Palm Springs for his job.

Moving to the desert was crazy for me because I had vowed as a little girl that I would never live in the desert, be married to a pastor, or work as a secretary. Shortly after moving to the desert, I became a church secretary at another church in the area. We bounced around from house to house in the desert. At one point after our son had moved out, we lived with one of our friends in her house. That doesn’t sound that outrageous, but how we got there was. We had a perfectly fine home at the time. However, God prompted both of us at a conference to call our friend and ask if we could live with her. Amazingly she said yes, which lead to a rich time of ministry to the youth of our church, as we used the house as our meeting base while the church was going through a remodel. When we finally moved out on our own again, both of us were working for the same church and growing in our ability to work together.

When the time came to leave the church, God had already prepared a new ministry for us to join – one that took us back to the very beginning. We are back working with people who are in various stages of recovery and growth, that often have the same questions that the youth we worked with had, and a need for unconditional love while they explore their relationship with God.

As I look, back at the rich, full life I’ve had, I’m thankful that God reminded me that day when I had iceberg feet, that He had a greater plan for our relationship than that romantic gooey stuff. It’s a good thing since my husband isn’t the classic hero type in a love story, but he is perfect for me. Every night when I fall into bed, he is there to hold my hand. Just as I drift off into my dream world, I know that my real world is so much better because of the man holding my hand. The man God picked out for me long before I ever met him, the one that would take me on great adventures and encourage me to be all I could be. Our story has been an epic God Hunt for me.

I look forward to many more years of hunting down God sightings with my extra special husband at my side.

Praying that God blesses your day with extra joy!

For more information about our ministry go to www.live180.org.