Title: Valentines Special...How I met my wife and her impact on my writing...and life:)

Title: Valentines Special...How I met my wife and her impact on my writing...and life:)

The journey to be a writer is not an easy one but having a wife with on that road makes it easier!  How did I get my wife?  Actually, I’m pretty sure she got me:)

My first day of college I wore a gray suit with a hat.  “What you cry in disbelief?”  You wonder if I was an idiot!  I was just following the college dress code.  We were to wear dress clothes in the morning...sweater minimum.  If you weren’t wearing a sweater, you had on a suit and tie.  I was training to be a pastor and to be honest an old school pastor dresses up a lot!  I’m fairly old school and still wear a suit every Sunday morning.  One time my wife and I went to a small mega church and I was the only one in the service with a suit on...maybe even a tie:)  At my church I’m one of the few that do wear a suit and I’m fine with that.  When people are like, “Uh...I can’t go to church, I don’t have dress clothes,” I reply with a smirk, “You’ll fit right it!”  ANYWAY, I was dressed to the nines, even taking the dress code into account.  I was on crutches having broken two bones in my foot during soccer practice days before and I was out for the season, which is why I was on crutches.  This did little to dampen my excitement that first day of college as I still had upper classman friends from the team and had been on campus for a whole week.  While other Freshman were nervous I was very laid-back...a little too laid-back:)  A guy in the crowd saw some of my antics and thought, “That guy is a cocky jerk!!”  He would be my next door neighbor (I didn’t have a roommate and it was AWESOME!!  Hey I came from a big family okay?!) my freshman year and we would become close friends.  My wife noticed me too, but she thought I was cute.  My mother-in-law noticed me too and thought I was trouble!  Boy was she right!!!  (We get along GREAT...now:)

Practical Bible Training School (which later became Practical Bible College, which even later became Davis College) had only a little over a hundred students, so within a matter of weeks you knew everyone’s name and months you knew everyone to a certain degree.  Of course, I had noticed that my future wife was gorgeous and I would have guessed she was the captain of her cheerleading team in high school.  I also thought that she was WAY out of my league and...that she was an airhead:)  I was wrong in my assumptions.  Gail was far from being an airhead and was in fact far smarter than I was.  She also was a jock, playing basketball and softball from seventh grade through her senior year.  Being a temporary cripple I lugged way too many books around and when girls asked to help I said in a manly voice, “No, thank you, I’ve got it.”  Yes, I’m not the brightest boy in the class, am I?  I said no to everyone except for Gail.  She asked one time and I was about to say no when I looked into her eyes and found myself saying yes.  Did I fall madly in love with her at that moment?  NO!  She was out of my league remember and she was an airhead!  Again, not the brightest boy in the classroom!  Another time she borrowed a writing utensil from me and by some miracle I had an extra pen!  After she went back to her seat my neighbor (the one that had thought I was a cocky idiot) said, “Hey, I think she likes you.”  “What?” I asked.  He shot back, “Dude she came through a class of forty people to borrow a pen from you!”  It was hard to argue with that logic but I already KNEW Gail was out of my league AND an airhead, so I quickly forgot the whole thing. 

I had been working on homework and hopped over to the student center for a break.  I literally hopped, discovering I could still run on one foot!  I got pretty good at it!  Of course I had taken my crutches with me and found the magic glowing box was on and it was playing STAR TREK the Next Generation!!!!  I was very excited and began to get absorbed in the episode!  Suddenly Gail came out of nowhere and STOLE my crutch!  This is generally known as flirting but remember, I wasn’t the smartest boy in the class...especially when it came to girls!  I was very annoyed!  Who WAS this girl and WHY was she interrupting Star Trek!!  All I can say it is amazing I helped bring four wonderful children into the world with that kind of attitude:)

Life consisted of me going to class, working in the library, hanging out with Clint or one of the Baker boys for awhile at night, and sometimes actually doing homework:)  (My son and daughter were genius’ at Davis college, you can begin to see why I was not!  I’m fairly certain they get their intelligence from their mother and their wild creativity and manic energy from yours truly:)  Then one night almost two weeks into school, a girl I was interested in got a boyfriend.  (They are happily married to this day by the way and I think that is AWESOME!!)  I was disappointed but somehow I knew they were right for each other and so it was a weird moment.  I thought it was God telling me something and so I visited my neighbor (remember the guy who thought I was a cocky jerk), and told him, “I think God is telling me I’m going to be single for awhile...and I’m okay with that.”  What do future pastors discuss late at night?  Theology most of the time and if not that then girls:)

That day Gail made sure she put herself directly in my path as I was NOT getting the hint, even when applied with a depleted uranium round!  I had to deal with this air head so I asked if we could talk after lunch.  I intended to tell her, since she was an AIRHEAD, that “Gail you’re a nice person but I just want to be friends.”  I think on some level I was intimidated by how pretty she was too.  I’m was not the most confident person in the world despite my outward persona.  We began to talk and I realized something... “This girl is NOT an airhead!”  The more I talked to her the more I liked her.  Finally, after two hours I blurted out, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”  Nothing like cutting to the chase I guess:)  “Yes,” she said, with a warm smile. 

Gail and I have been together for twenty-five years now.  She has faithfully been my children’s mother, my hot wife, a wise pastor’s wife, a mother for my sports teams (she has a cool sweatshirt that says, “Mrs. Coach:),  and of course a close supporter of my writing journey.  She has helped edit every C-3 book (not an easy task) for plot problems.  Gail is super intelligent, remember?  The C-3 series is complicated, like epic science fiction or space opera, but Gail keeps excellent track of the complex world and points out things that don’t make sense.  She also forces me to rewrite poor areas with the power only a wife has:)

Gail is also strong.  This year Austinburg Baptist was handed the Awana program we have helped in the last eighteen years, with only weeks away from the first day.  I came to her with a plan of how to use our church as an Awana facility.  Not only is she my closest confidant but she is also the “Sparky” director, know affectionately as “Miss Gail”.  She cut me off and said, “Honey, we’ve got to use Young Hickory!  It’s the only way!”   I looked at her with a tired expression.  “You realize how much work is left on that project and we have only three weeks.  With coaching we’ll never see each other.”  She said firmly, “It has to be that way.  Awana will never work in our building.”  My wife likes me and actually doesn’t like it when I’m super busy and she doesn’t see me, but she also cares about other people.  Glen, my trusty deacon, Brody a cool kid at church, and I attacked the project with others coming out of nowhere to help just when we needed them.  (My two kids at home couldn't help as the old building something really bothered their allergies...I'm thinking it was the old insulation as they are fine now.  More than once Leland and Autumn had to go outside their noses stuffed up and eyes bloodshot until I realized they couldn't help in this project.)  My wife came down, probably dead tired from work, and got the women of Awana to help design how the EG Youth Center would handle Awana without overwhelming its other ministries.  We opened on time and I have to say, I really like Awana at EG:) 

This is only a fraction of our lives together:)  When she’s mad her eyes narrow and nose crinkles in the most cute way and when she is happy, her green eyes dance!  (She has brown eyes normally...you only see the green when she is really happy:)  If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t have ANY novels in print...but that is another story for another time:)