(Continued.)
Sorry I've been too busy to finish this.
When I met my husband, I had a boyfriend. He was planning to visit a new RPG group one night at a game store near my house, and I decided on a whim to go with him. We all sat down around this big conference table, and down at the end, next to the GM, was this handsome Chinese man. When I looked at him, all the sound in the room just vanished, and I heard a Voice, as clear as if someone had shouted it in my ear, saying, "That's him. That's the man you're going to marry." I went home and broke up with my boyfriend that same evening. Two months later, almost to the day, my husband and I got married. Literally everyone I knew, including other Christians, thought I was completely insane. But 23 years, 3 kids, and 4 grandchildren later, we're still married, and still making people say, "You're so perfect together. I wish my marriage was like yours."
Joe and I actually eloped one weekend on the spur of the moment. Because Arizona doesn't have any sort of waiting period for getting married, we didn't have to leave town to do it. So we got the license and rings, gathered our families at the church, and did it. Because we both lived at our parents' houses at the time (we were both taking care of extremely sick parents), we didn't want to spend our wedding night at either place. So we reserved a room at a local hotel. Afterward, his mom took everyone out for dinner, and it ended up running late. When we got to the hotel, we found out that they had given our room to someone else. Then we found out that we had gotten married on the same weekend that both the rodeo and the Gem and Mineral Show were in town. Every hotel room in the city was booked up.
So there we are, at 10 pm on our wedding night, driving around looking for a place to stay and being turned away everywhere. Hoo boy. We're both tired and emotionally overwrought, and now we're having our first fight of our marriage. Finally, I told him to pull the car over. He did so, reluctantly, and asked what I was going to do. I think he thought I was going to get out of the car and storm away or something, but I told him that I was going to pray about it. Okay, now my new husband is looking at me like, "Oh, God, I married a lunatic." But he kept quiet, and I prayed. Then I told him to stop at the very next place, which would normally have been out of our price range.
We went in, told the desk clerk that we had just gotten married, and we needed some place, any place, to stay that night. The desk clerk said, "Well, I just got off the phone with a cancellation, so I could let you have his room. But I don't think you'll want it, because it's not a standard room. It's handicapped. So I can give you a discount on it if you don't mind that."
All the way up to the room, Joe didn't say a word, but he just kept looking at me like I had grown another head or something. I said, "What?" And he burst out, "How did you DO that?"
Throughout our marriage, I've made a practice of praying for help and guidance whenever things seemed unsolvable. Although Joe officially converted to my faith ten months after we married, he wasn't raised to believe in a relationship with God that was quite THAT personal and direct, and I suspect he's never entirely lost the notion that I'm nuts, but he always goes along with whatever I tell him God has said, no matter how unlikely it seems, and it's always right. We moved to Phoenix last year that way, even though it was a huge and risky leap of faith, and our lives have improved immeasurably.
Two weeks ago, I prayed for help and guidance, because our financial situation was stuck at a dead stop, and there didn't seem to be any way clear. We were both working two jobs to make ends meet, my day job was at a standstill, and his day job required a horribly long commute that was exhausting him. After I prayed, my boss suddenly decided that I needed to be offered a generous raise, and I told Joe that the time was right for him to quit his day job and go full-time with his second job, which is working from home as a legal transcriptionist, even though my salary alone - even with the raise - is not enough to support us. He was very leery of the whole thing, but he did it. The next day, he was assigned the largest job he's ever been given, which more than replaces his previous salary for the same period of work.
Like I said, God has never had to smack me to the ground with a road-to-Damascus moment, because I've never really fought against believing in Him in the first place.
