I wrote the following to preserve these memories for me, and perhaps for future generations. I have posted it now because it was thirty years ago this week that we became engaged.
The picture on the right was taken on our honeymoon.

A God Thing

You know how some things, some circumstances, are just so right that you know it must be a “God thing”? I’m not talking about the cliché “it feels good, so it must be right”, I’m talking about God arranging the circumstances and things come together in a perfect way. That’s how Carol and I were brought together.
Just a little over thirty years ago, we were both twenty years old and God brought ours lives together in a way only He could. Here’s the story.
I grew up in Ellsworth. Ellsworth is a small community in northern Michigan. My class had 18 kids graduate from high school. If one wanted to go to college you really had to leave home to do it. I had decided to go to Grand Rapids to attend Calvin College in the fall of 1974. I was 17 years old when I “went away to college”. There is a small CRC church in Ellsworth that was my home church. Our Pastor at the time was Rev. Marvin Vander Vliet. Pastor Marve and his wife spent a lot of time with our family and I considered him a friend and mentor. After one year attending Calvin College I transferred to Davenport College which is also in Grand Rapids. I moved off campus and my cousin, Stan, and I rented a very small house in the Grand Rapids area. In the summer of 1976 Pastor Marve took a call to a church called Cutlerville Hills CRC on the south side of Grand Rapids. I remember being bummed that we, Ellsworth, would be losing him. Through another set of circumstances (another story with God’s involvement) in the fall of 1976, Stan and I ended up renting a mobile home in the heart of Cutlerville. Stan was attending Calvin Seminary at the time and they started their fall semester some three weeks earlier that Davenport College did. So that year when I moved back down to the big city Stan had been down for a few weeks. In that time he went and got himself a girl friend. Yipes! That was really not high on my priority list, but it happens. Stan and I used to do lots of things together. We played tennis, handball, ping pong, basketball (intramural leagues at Calvin even though I didn’t go there), we bowled and golfed, went to movies, etc, etc. I was fine with that arrangement but apparently he felt something was missing in our relationship. So he found a girl. By the time I moved down that fall he was pretty occupied and I got lonely. I guess that’s when I started thinking about dating and courtship and girls and all that serious life stuff.
Also being in this new (to me) area of Cutlerville, I needed to find a church to attend on Sundays. I remembered that Pastor Marve had taken a call to one of the churches in Cutlerville. So I started attending the services there. At this time Pastor Marve had not moved to Cutlerville yet, but I knew he would be there soon. Of coarse, as a twenty year old male, one of my criteria for which church to attend was its “supply” (kind of searching for the right word to use here so as not to offend) of young ladies. Cutlerville Hills would do just fine in that regard as well, I soon confirmed.
Later in the fall, after Pastor Marve had been at Hills a while, he and I talked about starting a post high young adult group. Because he knew me and knew I was alone at the trailer most of the time, my place would be a good place to have the group meet. That sounded good to me. We put an announcement in the bulletin that a new post high youth group was going to be meeting at Fred Vail’s trailer at such and such address on Sunday night at 7pm or whatever. The fun part was that nobody knew who Fred Vail was and our trailer was in a park that did not have a good reputation at the time. So it wasn’t a sure thing that anyone would show up. We did meet and had a pretty good group of 8 or 9 faithful members. One of them was this sweet, shy, cute girl with a beautiful smile, named Carol. God literally brought her to my door and into my life. Carol told of how she almost didn’t come. She and her parents didn’t know me and, like I said, the trailer park was a little iffy, but she took the step to be involved.
Carol’s story, as I know it, goes something like this. She was shy but confident. She did not date a lot in high school. She was now in her third year at Calvin. I think she had her eyes on some guys that may have been “possibilities” but was not in a relationship with anyone at the time. I know she did not consider her situation to be desperate. She lived at home and commuted to Calvin. She was involved in a lot of the social activities at Calvin. She enjoyed the “rhythmic movement” (dare we say dancing) activities for students. She had her circle of close friends that did things together as well. But I think she was ready for a more serious relationship with a guy.
After a few meetings at my trailer, we all got to know each other better. I started looking for Carol at church and I think she started looking for me. I remember I would see her family come into church together and she would always sit next to this same guy. I thought “rats, she has a boyfriend” but I came to learn that that was her brother Dave. I found out that she worked at the local library. Now at that time I wasn’t a big library kind of guy but I did start visiting it more frequently. She was always friendly toward me and, from my dating history in which that usually wasn’t the case, I took that as encouragement. I found other reasons to interact with this sweet young thing. I remember calling her to ask if the copying machine at the library would copy erasable typing paper. Dumb question, I know, but if you remember erasable typing paper it is very thin and transparent so I thought that might be a problem. I really just wanted to talk to her. Around Thanksgiving time I got up the courage to ask her out. Our first date was in early December and was a South Christian HS (her alma mater) basketball game. I remember nothing about the game; I only remember we talked the whole time. If you know us, you know that neither of us are big talkers. It was like we just hit it off immediately. I told about my life and she listened. She talked about her life and I was enthralled. Something clicked right from the beginning and I definitely wanted to get to know her better. After that we were together a lot. It was hard leaving to go back to Ellsworth for the holiday break. I missed her. As it turned out she came to Ellsworth and stayed a few days with us. Wow!! She rode up with Stan and Barb on a slippery, winter night. She was very nervous about the trip but did so showing courage and faith. My family loved her, obviously. We did a lot of talking during that time she was in Ellsworth and already then we were starting to think (I know I was) that this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with.
In the early months of 1977 we spent a lot of time together. I was invited to Sunday dinner with her family almost every week. She would bake pies and cakes for Stan and me to enjoy. She would spend a lot of evenings at our trailer. I remember watching the entire “Roots” mini-series with her. There is the story of her having three dates in one night. That was either December of 1976 or January of 1977. I think she wasn’t for sure about me yet and had a couple of guys from Calvin on the line. There was some event at Calvin that one of them asked her to, the other one had asked her to go to dinner with him early in the evening and I had asked her to stop by later in the evening, she did all three. The good thing is I had the opportunity to make the last impression, too bad for those other guys. I think that’s the last time she dated anyone other than me. We definitely fell in love.
Many times then, and all through our marriage, I could only praise God for bringing a wonderful person like Carol into my life. How could I be so fortunate? Why would such a uniquely wonderful person love me and chose to spend her life with me? I finished with an Associate Degree from Davenport after the winter term in 1977. I got my first full time job on the north side of Grand Rapids shortly after that. In March of that year we decided we would get married. I didn’t do a grand proposal. Our style was more like “what do you think about getting married?” We shopped for rings together. She didn’t demand an expensive ring. She knew neither of us had any money. She was always like that. She never needed the fanciest house or a brand new car. She was always content with what we could afford. The next few months were a blur. We set a wedding date of August 5, the day before my twenty-first birthday. We went from 0 to married in about nine months! As I’ve stated before, that was the most correct thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Our honeymoon was a brief trip to Mackinac Island. It was a glorious start to a wonderful marriage. I was so blessed to have been her husband. I think she would say that she was blessed as well. Never has a man loved a woman more than I loved her. On August 5, 2002 we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. As many friends told us “that’s just a good start” and that’s really what I believed. We were both healthy and active and we expected to have many more years together. We didn’t do a big trip or anything for our 25th we talked about doing something special for our 30th as the kids would be out of school, etc. This year, 2007, would have been our 30th obviously that anniversary trip will never happen.
I know many people have similar stories about how God has worked so intricately in their lives. I also know that many people long for that. They long for God to bring Mr. or Miss Wonderful to their doorstep. Even after they’re married there are those that wish God would bless their union and, for them, it doesn’t seem to happen that way. I am amazed at the way God blessed me by bringing Carol into my life. I’ve been asked by others “How do I know if this is the person I should marry? If this is who God has intended for me?” I am eternally grateful that God chose to make it beautifully obvious for me.

I was blessed!