Finding a Good Thing

Since third grade I have wanted three things in life: to get married, have children and be a minister.  The ministry part was easy.  I started preaching when I was fifteen and have been preaching ever since.  I was ordained in January of 1988 in Las Cruces, New Mexico when I was twenty-four years old.  The having children part needed to wait on getting married but the getting married part was hard.

If I had been less picky or the girls had been more willing then I might have been married much sooner.  The truth is that I was obsessed with getting married.  It was all I thought about.

It was my parents fault really.  They had such a perfect marriage that I wanted to have the same thing.  Of course I couldn’t marry my mom so it narrowed the field a lot.  There just weren’t a lot of girls like mom.  The problem with looking for someone like mom is that I was not really like dad so it follows that I needed someone uniquely qualified for me because, like everyone else in the world, I am unique.

So I dated different girls looking for the right one.  I thought I found her several times.  I even asked three of them to marry me and one of them even said yes but it was not to be.

After what seemed like an eternity of looking I got a new roommate: Gary Boney.  Gary was several years older than me and a bachelor.  He had never been married.  Not that he was against the idea.  He had just never found the right one.  He started taking me places and doing things with me - all of the sudden I was enjoying the single life and was no longer actively looking for that one special one that would be my wife.  For the first time in my life I was really happy in my present state.

It was during this happy time that Deanna came into my life.  I saw her every where all the time.  I had no idea at the time that she had planned all this.  We had been married for years before I realized that she plans everything and that our meeting was no surprise.

At this time I was the assistant director of the Baptist Student Union.  David Englehart, the director, had given me the assignment of visiting all these girl prospects on campus.  So, I needed a girl to go with me to do the visiting.  Guess who volunteered?  You got it, Deanna.  We spent hours together visiting girls in dorm rooms and other places on campus.  She also seemed to be with me whenever I went to eat in the cafeteria.  I was working with her cousin in evangelism training and we seemed to run into her all the time.  Years later I learned that she would ask my cousin when and where we would be going.  She was a true planner.

I picked her as the girl to go with me because I didn’t think I would be interested in her.  She was shy and quiet and all the girls that I had dated had been outgoing and leaders.  When we were together, she seldom said much but the thing that won my heart was what she said to the girls that we were visiting.  She said things that showed a depth of spiritual maturity and understanding that I had not found in other girls that I had dated.  As we spent more and more time together I began to grow a respect and love for her.

We never dated.  I was not allowed to date students so we went to group things and sometimes she would go with me to Hachita where I was the pastor of a small country church.  But in time I had to admit to David that I had grown to love her and that I was going to ask her to marry me.

After meeting her family over Thanksgiving I began to plan to ask her.  We had had some discussions about marriage and what it entailed but I hadn’t asked her yet.  During the Christmas break my brother was going to get married and Deanna was going with me so that she could meet my family.  On the way we stopped at a rest area that overlooks the valley below and has a good view of the Jornada de Muerto (Journey of the Dead).

The early Spaniards traveled this way to the north and many of them lost their lives in the hot desert land.  In fact so many of them died that they called it, “Jornada de Muerto.”

When we got back in my little Mazda pickup, it would not start so I told her maybe it was the engine fuse.  (The real problem was that I had not pushed in the clutch so it wouldn’t start)  So, I got out, opened the hood, and began to look.  I asked her to get a little plastic bag out of my tool box that had my car fuses in it.  When she got it out and was bringing it to me she was thinking this jerk keeps his fuses in a ring box that he has from some other girl.

When she gave me the ziplock bag I took it and then I looked down at the valley told her:  “You know if we ever got married, sometimes it would be like that valley down there – lush and green – happy times - other times it would be like this desert - dry and difficult – hard times.  It would be a journey and it is a journey that I would like to share with you.  Will you marry me?”  Later that day I asked her dad if I could marry her.

Six month later we were married on May 19, 1990.  We have had the happy times and hard times but through it all my love and respect for Deanna has grown and I’m still amazed at her depth.

A man's greatest treasure is his wife-- she is a gift from the LORD.   (Proverbs 18:22)