the wife of one man: a love story

This is me, age 19, in my favourite spot: meditating in the Pennsylvania mountains.

I had just ended my third relationship, this time with a guy I met in college.  Or, rather, he ended it for me.  He offered some lame excuse, but it wasn't long before he was being seen around campus with another girl.  And I was left reeling with hurt, anger, and jealousy.

This was not going to happen to me again.   The dating game was getting old, but Joshua Harris had not yet written his classic I Kissed Dating Goodbye.  So I did the only desperate thing I knew to do.

I prayed.

After six agonizing months living in a college full of paired off couples, I went home for summer break, and I prayed.

Lord, You know my heart.  You know how I long to be a wife, and have children, and stay home with them, and home school them.  You know how hurt my heart has been.  I'm tired of looking for a husband.  Just please, You give me the man you want me to have.  You pick him out and bring him into my life.  Because I'm done.  I can't go through this again.

I was 19 years old, ready to be an adult for real, not just an over-grown kid pretending to be an adult.  I wrote a list.  I wish I still had it, but to the best of my memory, here were some of the items:

...a Christian
...believes like I do, doctrinally
...plays the guitar
...has brown, curly hair
...has a beard
...has blue eyes

Yes, I prayed about the color of his eyes and hair.  Maybe those things aren't important, but, hey--I serve a God who delights in giving His children what they want, not just what they need. 

I put the list away and went for a walk.  It must have been a Sunday afternoon, because I decided to walk all the seven miles from my house to my church for the evening service.  It was early enough that I decided to visit some friends who were the caretakers of Maranatha, a Bible camp very close to our church.

As I walked, I prayed again about my list.  Then I gave it all to the Lord, and enjoyed a brisk walk on a sunny day.  I got to the camp, walked into the house, and saw the most depressed-looking person I had ever seen in my life.  He needed a haircut, he had no beard, and he just looked terrible.  I knew who he was.  His name was Tom, he lived somewhere in Ohio, and he was friends with the camp caretakers.  He visited sometimes on weekends, and attended our church when he was here.  That was all I knew, and that was more than I wanted to know.  Oh, and he was old.  I guessed late 20s, early 30s.

No, Lord, not him.

So God let me go another whole year, waiting, praying, trying hard to avoid relationships with the wrong guys.  Or even with the guys who seemed like they might be okay.  I even transferred to a different school to lessen my chances of falling for a guy who did not believe the same doctrines as me.  All the while, the more I prayed, the more I lost interest in college, and the more restless I got.  Finally, in April 1986, the directive came.

Go home, Cathy.  No more college.  Go home and live with your parents, and help them, and I will bring you the man I want you to marry.

And there was peace.  I was ready to move on, into whatever the Lord would bring my way.

By the beginning of May I was home, settling into a new routine.  Then they came to my house, the caretakers of the camp.  Ever to the point, and blunt almost to a fault (but lovable all the same), this man said to me, "We heard you quit college, and we came to find out why."

After recovering a bit from the shock of such a direct question, I answered, "God told me to come home, and that He would bring me the man He wants me to marry."

"Well, we know a man who's looking for a wife.  But you might not be interested, because he's older.  He's our age."

I knew they meant Tom.  I looked at his wife to see if they were being serious.  They were.

"No, thanks.  I don't think so."

"Well, we're having a workday at the camp this weekend, and he'll be there.  Why don't you just come, and see what you think?  You don't have to talk to him, just come."

Of course, I was going to be there.  I always went to camp workdays when I could, and there wasn't going to be any way I could suddenly back out.  I had to go.  But now it was going to be awkward.  Did he know we were being set up?  Did he care?  Would he be laughing up his sleeve at some school girl checking out an older man?  Did he even know (or care) how old I was?  Grr...  Camp workdays were supposed to be fun, not tense with the eyes of would-be matchmakers and all their friends watching your every move.

I went.  I stayed with the ladies cleaning the kitchen and making lunch, and avoiding the men at all costs.  Then the ladies (were they laughing at me?) told me to go call the men for lunch.  I couldn't avoid him any longer.  I had to bite the bullet.

I walked into one of the back tabernacle rooms, and there he was, up on a ladder, with his back toward me.  There were other men in the room, too.

"Hey, guys," I said.

And he turned around.  And suddenly all I could see was the beard he had grown since I'd seen him last.  And the curly, slightly unruly, brown hair.  And the blue eyes.  And my heart turned over, and I was forever his.

"It's time for lunch."  Somehow I got the words out.  I went back to the kitchen, trying really, really hard to act like absolutely nothing had happened.  I didn't want them to know.

But they kept at it.  They took me to Tom's church, and out to eat with them and him.  They took us shopping, and we bought Tom's first tie, to wear while teaching the adult Sunday school class one Sunday.  We went to his pastor's house for dinner afterward, where we suddenly found ourselves completely alone on the front porch.  They must have arranged that, too.

But I think it was there, on that porch, that I found out Tom played the guitar.  The guitar.

Once I asked them, "Why is this so important to you, to get us together?"

"Because you both seem to have what the other wants," came the answer.

In June, Tom finally called, and asked for a date.  We went to Dairy Queen, where he ordered a black cherry milkshake, and I ordered an Oreo blizzard.  Blizzards had just come out, and that was my first one.  We talked about a lot of things.  Mostly I don't remember what, but I do remember he told me his testimony, how God had saved him from sin, out of rock-n-roll and drugs.  That impressed me.  He was the first guy ever to tell me, on a date, how God had saved him.

I went to bed that night telling myself I had just gone out with the man I was going to marry.

In July, we were engaged.  In August, we announced our engagement at a get together in the dining hall after one of the evening services at Maranatha.  In September, Tom left to look for work and housing in Georgia.  After that, the letters flew back and forth until Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1986, when we were married, forever and always.

Our wedding day, November 27, 1986

Tom still plays the guitar.  His love for the Lord has grown deeper, and that love is reflected in the songs he writes.  His brown curls have turned gray over the years, but he still has his beard, and his blue eyes still make my heart turn over.

July 2012, sitting on the same bridge where Tom proposed 26 years earlier.