(This is the seventh in a series of posts detailing my testimony as I trace the faithfulness of God from my birth until the present day)
“Go eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.” -Ecclesiastes 9:7-10
Finally after several months of false starts and waning impatience, the Lord was faithful to provide what he had shown me all along, as I started dating the woman who would shortly become my wife. And once we started dating it was as if we had been together forever. With both of us in school and working, we often only had late evenings available to us, but still we got together every night to snuggle up on her couch, talk, and watch the Food Network together, often times until 2 or 3 in the morning.
After a few months of dating, knowing that we intended to get married, we began actually making plans about such. We discussed how long we should wait to tie the knot and what an appropriate time to get engaged would be. At a point when a lot of people still thought it surprising that my girlfriend was even dating me, we had already set out the course for the rest of our lives.
We got even deeper into it when we began looking for engagement rings for the first time, this being at Tiffany’s on 5th Avenue in New York City! Until now I don’t think I had heard much of the cliched girly enthusiasm out of my wife concerning our engagement, but surrounded by a room full of rings carrying the price tags of luxury cars, her eyes became fixated on all of the sparkles. Needless to say, we did not buy anything there, but soon after returning home from that trip we went to the local jewelry store and she found a set that she wanted. About a month later, 6 months after we had started dating, I bought her ring.
Then, following 10 and 1/2 months of dating, the time was right for me to take the plunge. I called my girlfriend’s dad and met him for lunch in order to ask for his blessing. This was nerve racking, not because I was nervous around her dad, since actually I feel very at ease talking with him, but because, as I have often told my wife, I wasn’t quite sure what to say since this is not the kind of thing that you want to have a lot of experience with. All went well though, and I left that day with full permission to ask for my girlfriend’s hand officially. Going into the appointed night I wasn’t quite set on my plan, which was okay since every attempt I made got foiled by her anyways. Eventually, after a night full of missed opportunities, we found ourselves standing in her room hugging. As we stood there she said one of her favorite refrains at the time: “I can’t wait till we get married.” Seeing this as the opening I had been looking for all night, I dropped to my knee, fumbled the box out of my pocket, and proposed to her in the middle of her floor. Of course she said yes.
All of the marriage preparation was exciting, but the real question for us in getting married would be her interactions with my daughter. Luckily this really wasn’t an issue either, since the two of them had bonded seemingly before she had even connected with me. From the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that she would be the mommy that my little girl had always needed. My daughter confirmed this herself, as before too long she began calling my fiancee ‘Mom,’ being fully aware that this one wasn’t going to leave. Once we were married my wife adopted our little girl, and today, unless you were told, you would never know that this little girl had not been both of ours all along. This is one of our daughter’s favorite stories, that unlike most babies who just come to there mommy’s and daddy’s, my wife actually got to pick her little girl.
Running alongside this relationship and everything going on in it, my fiancee and I were also still in school. She had just started in the Physical Therapy program while I was preparing to graduate and trying to decide what to do next. After weighing the options of law school and graduate school for math, I chose to head to grad school in the fall. Looking back, this seems like an interesting choice for someone who almost didn’t go to college, to love it so much once he got there that he wanted to keep going after graduation, and, if I completed my PhD, to be there for the rest of my life. But so was the love that God had given me for the academic world.
Using this love for college and the college environment, God also saw fit to move us into getting involved with a new project at our church. It began as a simple ministry of prayer walking on campus, but after some thought by our pastor and encouragement through the Spirit, it was decided to start a church plant at the university. God worked to call out a pastor and, along with a few other volunteers, we found ourselves getting involved with the initial core leadership team. This was an exciting venture for me, as I thoroughly enjoyed walking through the beginnings of starting a church. Even though this wasn’t the hardest plant ever, it was certainly a nice way to be introduced to the world of planting and to be able to get more involved with the work of God in service in the church. This presented a lot of good challenges for me in learning to work with people in ministry and follow the leadership of a pastor, and I could not be more thankful for the way God grew me through this experience.
As time passed on, our wedding came and went, and in just under two years I had gone from the skirt-chasing terror of my churches college ministry to being a very happy, very settled husband. I had a cute little townhouse and a beautiful wife, a growing little girl and a church that we loved serving in, around people that we enjoyed being with. Professionally, my studies were very successful and I was well on my way to earning a PhD and going into the comfortable life of academe. After so many years of stress and anger and chaos, God had brought me to a nice, comfortable life. Not comfortable as in possessions, but comfortable in that he had provided me with all that my heart could desire and in giving me a peace in inside like I had never quite felt before. However, now that I had had some time to dwell in the peace of the comfort he had allotted, God began to work again to stretch my trust in him, this time by causing me to reconsider everything about the future I had envisioned in my head.
