had spent almost every day together during the previous year
working side by side in the office or heading up club meetings,
staff meetings, and retreats for the students in our city.
A turning point in our relationship occurred while at the
annual Campus Life Weekend in November. While playing in
the Mud Bowl, a rowdy coed football game between staff and
students, Roger, while attempting to tackle me, fell and broke
his glasses.
On that Sunday night, after dropping off all the kids after
camp, we sat in his van and talked about our relationship in a
very serious, though cryptic, manner. He said, “I don’t want to
ruin our ministry relationship by dating. We need to pray and
ask God to confirm our relationship, to ask Him for a Scripture.”
So we did.
As a relatively new and impressionable young Christian, I
thought, “Is this how Christians do the dating/marriage thing?”
Though Roger’s idea for confirming our relationship was
foreign to my previous, non-Christian way of serious dating, I
was very open and excited to do just what he suggested. (From
the day I became a Christian, I have always expected God to do
something or say something unpredictable, and He has. Even
though this was a strange request, it was not out of character
for me to think that God would certainly give us a Scripture.)
The next morning, Roger did what any man who needed new
eyeglasses would do. He asked me—the girl who might be
spending a lot more time with him in the future—to go
shopping with him to pick out new frames.
He picked me up at my college dorm (where I was living for
the semester), and we drove together to an eyeglass store in
our small college town of Berea, Ohio. The eyeglasses that I