A Rural American Girl and a Suburban Canadian Boy

Have you ever had one of those moments when you met someone for the first time, but you felt like you had known them forever?

It was intermission at our first concert of the year for the women’s choir at the Bible college I was attending. After the first hour or so of our concert, we would file out, following a climactic choral anthem of praise, for a break.

As I entered the back foyer of the church, my eyes met with another woman from the group. Without saying a word, we knew our minds were on the same thing: not getting a drink or using the washroom, but praying. We joined hands and hearts, and from then on, a lifetime friendship centered on Christ was born.

As it goes with friends in the twenty-something range, girls meet boys and boys meet girls and girls and boys introduce their friends to each other. This friend married a fellow student whose brother often came to visit them after they got married. Since we were still in Bible school at the time, I was often invited over to even out the company.

My friend’s brother-in-law worked in Toronto for an accounting firm, but was sensing God calling him to something new. My friend asked me to pray for him frequently as he believed seminary and full-time ministry was in his future.

So…I prayed for him, while I also prayed for that rural farm boy whom I thought God was going to send my way in order to make me a small-town pastor’s wife.

Little did I know that I as I prayed for him, I prayed for my future husband. My sister-in-Christ became my sister-in-law, and the Lord made me the wife of a Canadian boy from suburbia who wore a leather jacket and drove a red sports car.

How would God put this Canadian, suburban boy and a rural, Michigan farm girl in a place to fulfill the calling He’d laid on both of their hearts? Of course, God had that all figured out, too.

After only six months of newly-married life in an apartment in the city of Toronto, Ontario, we sold many belongings and crammed what we had left into a U-Haul trailer.  We crossed the border. We crossed half of the country. My white-collar, Canadian, business boy was making a career change by going to seminary in Colorado.

We felt a bit like Abraham and Sarah heading to the Promised Land as we had no jobs arranged and only a trust that there would be an apartment on campus for us in which to live. Neither of us had seen the seminary before, and my husband had never even traveled that far west. But just as God was faithful to Abraham and Sarah, He was faithful to us. A few weeks into our arrival we had an apartment, good-paying jobs for both of us, and a church family who became instrumental in where God would place us in future ministry.

The cultural lessons continued as I adjusted to the differences between the West and the MidWest and to being a three-days drive away from the family with whom I had always been close. My husband learned that being Canadian didn’t really mean he was from the 51^st state! Our best friends were a couple from Rhode Island. Our church family was made up of people from all various parts of the US, and most of my husband’s friends were from overseas or Texas!

All of this prepared us for the challenge and blessing of cross-cultural ministry in our own backyards and taught us to appreciate the differences in the Body of Christ.  After all, we were certainly living the cultural challenge every day in our marriage as we began to learn the minute and sometimes large differences between the US and Canada.

That moment a few years earlier that eventually led to my sister-in-the-Lord becoming my sister-in-law assured me that we have a God who brings people together for His purposes. I knew He would continue to lead us where He wanted us to go.

{Part 2 of 3}

GO HERE for Part 1
GO HERE for Part 3