Still a lucky man 10 years later

I want to tell you about a most remarkable woman.
For the last 10 years she has put up with a lot. How she got this far, I’ll never know but will be forever grateful. It was on Dec. 17, 1999, that Sandy became my wife. How we got together is an interesting story. How we stayed together is even more incredible.
It all began in 1998. I was very active in a single parent’s class at Rocky Mountain Christian Church in Niwot, Colo. Having gone through a divorce, I found me and my daughter living with my parents.
One Sunday this young lady came into the single parent’s class for the first time. What interested me in her was not her physical attributes or her infectious smile. It was her story. You see, she came in asking for prayers for her father, Joe Snyder. He was on a mission trip in China and had been arrested.
The journalist in me could recognize that a major story had just been dumped into my lap. I handed her my business card and told her I wanted to do the story for the Times-Call, the local newspaper where I worked. A couple weeks later I was sitting at their kitchen table with her father telling me the story of how the local police had taken the group he was with in for questioning and then detained them in the house where they were staying. It was against the law to evangelize in China and it was clear that this tall, lanky white man was not there to teach English.
It just happened to be that they were detained on July 4, 1998, and at that same time President Clinton was in China. Rather than risk an embarrassing international incident, the group was detained rather than jailed. They were not allowed to hold any more of their meetings and had to leave the country with the understanding they would not be welcomed back. Those were agreeable terms.
So, whenever people ask us how we met, we tell them we met because her father got arrested in China. You don’t hear that response every day.
I have to admit that at first I was not interested in a relationship with Sandy. She is much younger than I am, was a single parent with a very rambunctious toddler, and at the time I was interested in someone else. That other person, however, was wise enough to see that Sandy was a better match for me and she kept nudging us together in subtle ways.
One day I put out word that I had a pair of tickets to see Glen Campbell in concert and needed someone to go with. Sandy was the only one to respond, so off we went. At the time I thought of it as a friendly outing, but we now consider that to be our first date.
Fast-forward to Valentine’s Day 1999. A group of guys in the class did a special dinner for a group of the girls. I wound up partnered with Sandy and as we talked, I learned that we had a lot of common interests. So, we started formally seeing each other.
Three months later, we were at the Star Wars Celebration in Denver. We were standing in line in the rain and mud waiting to get into a large tent so we could see some of the actors from the new movie coming out. It was there that I first asked Sandy if she would be my wife. Her enthusiastic response lit me up like a lightsaber!
We made the engagement formal on Mother’s Day. We invited my parents to her parents’ home for lunch so they could meet. As the six of us sat around the table on the back deck, I called my daughter, Heather, and her son, Wesley, to stop playing and come over for a minute. I asked them how they would like to be brother and sister. They liked the idea, but neither of them seemed to grasp what was going on. Then I took a knee and offered Sandy a ring and asked her to marry me.
At the time we were trying to figure out when to get married, Sandy was in school working to become an RN. We set the date during her semester break. Though she later dropped out of school, things were in motion, so we kept the date.
I have to tell you that a mid-December wedding is not an easy thing to plan. But then not much about the last 10 years has been easy for us. At first we clashed over parenting styles and other issues. But once we added two more of our own to the brood, we quickly got on the same page and have been working a zone defense ever since.
As anyone who has blended a family before can tell you, it ain’t easy. On top of that, we’ve had the rise and fall of a home-based business. With its demise came a bankruptcy, foreclosure, numerous jobs and moves, clinical depression for me, and lingering financial difficulties.
Any one of these things is far worse than what a lot of marriages in America today will handle. And to be sure, this is only scratching the surface of our struggles. But here we are, 10 years later, still fighting the good fight and more in love now than ever before.
The secret to our marital survival is our foundation in Jesus Christ. You see, it’s been a three-way partnership all along. No matter how heated or difficult things got, we always kept Christ at the center of our relationship and our family.
Today we can enjoy the fruits of our labor of love. We have four wonderful children. Sandy has her degree in business administration and a good job in the medical field. And I have a wife of incredible inner strength and beauty. I am as blessed as any man can be. And I owe it all to a loving God and a father-in-law who had a calling to spread the Good News of Jesus in China.
Happy anniversary, Sandy – you’re the greatest!