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It is a question we often get, "How did the two of you meet?" Of course, the real, unasked question is, "How in the world did you end up with her!" I know it is, and I ask myself the same question most every day. So here is how.
In the summer I turned 30 I was working part time for a Christian radio station located about and hour and a half from where I lived. I was the "weekend overnight guy". A friend of mine had gotten me the job. He was the "weeknight overnight guy".
One night, as Memorial Day was approaching, he began to solicit callers to give a testimony about any miracle they had recently experienced. He was going to splice the best ones into a song for a Memorial Day special. Karen, whom I did not know at the time, called in because she had recently survived an accident on the Interstate where her car had gone under an 18-wheeler. I happened to be in the studio with him that night and heard her call.
A few weeks later he and his wife accepted a position as Youth Pastor in a church several hundred miles away. He threw himself a going away party on the radio and, as was his custom, acted like a nut. However, when he got to the church, no one there knew anything about him. Apparently, after he was hired, the Pastor went on vacation and had a heart attack (he survived) before he was able to tell anyone. Added to that, my friend's car blew up and left them stranded.
Knowing nothing else to do, he called the station about getting his old job back, which he did, and then called me to come pick him and his wife up, which I did. His first night back on the air the phone lines lit up with people interested in knowing why he was back. One of those callers was Karen.
For some reason, still unknown to him, he had the bright idea to try to hook Karen up with me. He got her permission, gave me her number, and we played phone tag for a couple of days.
Then, one night we connected. We spent about and hour and a half on the phone, 45 minutes of which we prayed with each other (mostly her praying). The goodness of her heart was immediately apparent. That was a Thursday (August 7 to be exact).
The next night I drove down to the station for my shifts. Before I went on I told my friends there that unless God did something unexpected (universal guy code for "unless she is as ugly as a dog), I was going to marry her. Little did I know that at almost the exact same moment, Karen was in her church, at the altar, praying for me to be "the one" (good girl code for not a "filthy, low-down, rotten sinner").
The next week we had our first date. And God had not "done something unexpected". She was (and is) breathtaking. Which is why so many people, when they first meet us, assume that we are rich. (Let that sink in for a second.)
Two and a half weeks after the first phone call, I asked her to marry me. She laughed. She claims it was nervous laughter. I think it was more a well-I-did-ask-God-for-this-so-I-guess-I-have-to-say-yes laughter.
Since I knew from the very beginning just how sweet, kind, caring, compassionate, and (and this is the "biggie") Godly she was, I conceived of a novel way to present the ring. I bought her a Women's Devotional Bible. I marked three scriptures with bookmarks. One scripture was in Ruth about the kind of woman she was. Another was in Ecclesiastes about how lucky I was she said yes. And the third was in Habbukuk concerning God's role in our marriage. The ring was taped to the third bookmark. On the Bible I had her name-to-be inscribed. I handed her the gift-wrapped Bible and waited as she opened it.
Because I had to ask her what her name was going to be (was she dropping her middle name, her maiden name, or hyphenating), when she saw the gift, she thought it was a plaque. She immediately began crying (of course) once she realized it was a Bible. And she continued crying as she turned from scripture to scripture.
And this is the kind of woman I married. When she got to the bookmark with the ring, she was so excited to read the verse, that she handed me the ring. Then, once she saw what the verse said, she gave me her hand to put the ring on.
A shade before three months after our first phone call, we got married. It's been 12 wonderful years.
That's it for now. I'll tell the rest of the story later.
Oh yeah, for those still wondering about the "rich" comment earlier. Since she is so beautiful, people would naturally assume I would have to be rich to get her.
And, why is this called Fabulous Wife Babe? Well that comes from a talk radio host whose theme song I appropriated and paraphrased to refer to Karen.
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