To God be the glory great things He hath done! (August 25, 1969)  Continued from yesterday…

After my incredible encounter with Jesus the previous fall, I received some wonderful advice about praying for my wife.  The leader instructed me, “I want you to pray for your wife – but don’t pray, ‘God, send me a wife’.  I want you to pray for her like this.  Lord Jesus, I thank you that you have the girl I am going to marry.  I pray that she will come to know you – that you will protect her and bless her.  Thank you that you are preparing us for one another.  I acknowledge that in your time and in your way, you will bring us together.  I commit her and our relationship to you.”  So I regularly began praying in this way for the unknown girl who would be my wife.  This was the framework of my declaration of “THAT’S HER!”

When we finished dinner, David asked Donna to go with him to take some film to be developed.  Great was my relief when she said no.  After he left, I asked if we could go for a walk and she said yes.  Even though I was beside myself with what was going on within me, I wanted to tell her about Jesus and how I met Him.  She wanted to find out what was the glow that was around my head in the meeting.

I was telling her about Jesus while we walked but my mind was in a whirlwind.  There was a popular song at the time with the line, “Then I went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like I love you.” And it was running through my mind.  We walked to a stone bench under the pines next to a stone chapel and sat down.  What was going on within me was so consuming I finally couldn’t continue talking.  So I said to her, “There is something I have to tell you.”  Donna said, “Go ahead.”  I replied, “I love you.”  She replied, “I love you too.”

At that point, I said, “Let’s pray.”  My prayer was simply this, “Lord Jesus – If this is not of you, stop it.  But if this is of you, please confirm it.”  And “heaven landed with a thud!”  That is how I have described it for 52 years.  We were immediately surrounded and embraced by a manifestation of God’s presence!  He imparted (downloaded) everything into both of us – the knowledge, the thrill, the excitement, the affection, the commitment, the utter joy and the complete settledness.  It was done!!  We knew, sitting on the bench praying, that God had chosen us for each other and we were to be married.  We belonged to each other.

From that moment, there has never been any doubt that God chose us for each other – not the slightest doubt – ever!  I always knew that I was capable of loving someone.  I never dreamed that anyone could or would love me the way Donna does.  This was and is something beyond my wildest dreams.  Later I discovered that Donna had been proposed to by a friend the weekend before but had to tell him no.  She was unable to say she loved him.  She could only say that to the man she knew she would marry!

God impressed on us we were to be married – He didn’t say get married.  I still had my senior year of college to go and He knew that I needed to be loved not married.  Now I was able to focus on my studies.  We were married 13 months later just following my graduation from college.

Tomorrow – Donna’s amazing vision of Jesus on the cross the next day….