Story #4

 One of the fun/amazing things about blogging, is occasionally receiving emails from total strangers or people with vague connections to your world. The other day such an email showed up in my inbox. Imagine my surprise to find a "How we met" story from someone I knew by name only; someone my brother and his family worked with in Nicaragua years ago! I am delighted to share the story of how Timo and his wife, Joanna, met. I am also privileged to let you know how to find out the rest of the story.................



                                  In Which the Plain Guy Meets the Flowered Dresses

“Here she comes” quipped one of my seven married co-workers as he shoved a piece of sheeting up through the rafters. I jumped up and said: “Where? Where?” The other six men looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

“What do you mean, ‘where’?”

“Well” I answered, “he said: ‘here she comes’ and I thought it was an answer to prayer!” They about rolled off the roof…

Long ago I had found that if you get teased about girls, the best way to handle it was to just go right along with it. In my experience I found that the two normal reactions for boys, denial or stammering, just made things worse.

But that still didn’t totally keep them from giving the only single guy on the crew a rough time. They knew I was soon to go to Farmington, NM for a term of voluntary service at Lamp & Light Publishers, working as the Spanish Correspondence Director. They insisted that the only reason I was going was for the flowered dresses.

And behold, I arrived in Farmington and saw many flowered dresses. In all the colors and sizes of the rainbow… but I still had my eyes set on a plain girl that used to smile at me every time the youth group sang “Life Without Thee Would be Dreary”. She was a shy girl of few words, but with a certain zip that gave her an interesting twist. And lest you think her coquettish, I will hasten to assure you she was not. She was a nice girl! Our relationship never went far on the visible side, and I never smiled back. So she couldn’t even have parroted the quote of another famous character, “We never met. We just smiled.”

But change was in the air. The girls working at the Gingerich Home, just across from Lamp & Light’s offices, were a bit short on work. Lamp & Light offices needed cleaning, so it seemed like a good way to put excess energy to work.

Two girls descended on the offices with all manner of cleaning supplies. A week or so later, it was all done. But one of the girls left praying for herself, even if she didn’t know it at the time.

During the cleaning, Joey found a picture I had managed to acquire through shrewd measures. It was a beautiful photo of a girl that was smiling that “special” smile.

Joey, being the praying girl she was, interceded before her Father for Timo and his future wife.

The smiling girl’s father told me “no” soon after. I was devastated and confused. How could I know the Lord’s will? And the girl had given me all indications that she liked me!!!

The Lord continued working on me and continued turning my heart towards a girl that now was gone. Gone because her brother and sister died. She was needed at home again.

So it happened, that some months later, Joey got a thin letter with a Bloomfield, NM return address, with no outside indication of the sender’s name. She opened the letter… and the rest is history.

You can read the letter, the reaction and the conclusion in Joey’s Story.

God is Love. He loves love stories!!!

Timo


Thank you so much, Timo, for sharing your story with us! It sounds like a story I'd like to read more about :) Maybe the rest of you would too?  The book is available from Christian Light Publications or Amazon. Or it just might be on someone’s shelf near you…
If you are a devoted reader of the Life in the Shoe you might also be one of the lucky ones to get a free book once Dorcas Smucker posts her book review there.