Family Friday

I spent a lot of time this week talking about how I protect my relationship with my wife. For those of you who don't know our story, we think it's a pretty good illustration of the "what God has joined together" thing.

Both of us graduated from Oklahoma State University. Both of us went to the same church throughout college. I knew several girls in her sorority house pretty well - I even dated one of them for a while. Both of us took "Family Development" together in the same room, same semester, same time, same professor. We lived about two blocks from each other, frequented the same Stillwater, OK haunts, and have several mutual friends from college. Our dad's even went to Oklahoma State together and have pictures of the two of them together at various college events. And both Kari and I had this idea in our heads that we would go to college, meet our future spouse, get married the weekend after graduation and live happily ever after. But we never met.

Both of us reached our senior year in panicked. We approached graduation without having found our future spouse. And both of us set out for Dallas Theological Seminary with a very real feeling that we would never find the person we would spend the rest of our life with.

The very first day of freshman orientation, being a fairly bright guy, I found the cutest girl in the room and sat down next to her. And the rest is history.

Looking back, if Kari had known me in college, she wouldn't have liked me. If I had known Kari in college, I wouldn't have made time for her. If we had met on one of the countless numbers of times we passed each other on campus or in the halls of our church, things most certainly wouldn't have worked out. Knowing what we know now...

It's easy on this side of things, but it was pretty difficult as we approached graduation and God's provision didn't work on our timetable. And now that Kari and I get to work with young adult singles, from time to time we have to resist the urge to smile when a young single person expresses his or her discouragement with not having found that "special someone," knowing she might have just passed him on the way in...