Once upon a time there was this brown-haired little girl who grew up as a PK , moving with her family to six different towns and five different churches in two states before she went into eighth grade. Incidentally, one of those churches was in the Mississippi Delta.
At the same time, this blond-haired boy was also growing up as a PK in Mississippi. He moved a bit, too, living in North Mississippi long enough to become a through and through Ole Miss Rebel fan (and hey, this is my story, so there will no PC discussions allowed) and then then spent the majority of his school years in the Mississippi Delta. Interestingly enough, at one point these two kids lived within an hour of each other, and never met.
Until an August day in 1984, in the music library at Garrett Hall at Blue Mountain College, a nice little Southern Baptist school in North Mississippi, that, at the time, was considered a women’s college, with the only men gaining admission being those who had demonstrated a definitive calling in their lives to ministry. That background is necessary, because when the brown-haired girl enrolled three years earlier, she made it abundantly clear to the “preacher boys” that she had no intention of becoming a preacher’s wife, because she had had enough of that fishbowl growing up. She had grand plans of a performance degree in voice, which she did get, and then seeing where she could go with that-eyes on the prize being the Met or the Kennedy Center as an opera singer. Hey, she might even de-throne Sandi Patti!
So this geeky blond-haired boy in a tweed jacket with the professor patches on the elbows comes over to the brown-haired girl, dressed in a ratty pair of shorts she had owned since her junior year of high school, and an equally ratty orange “Florida Beach Bem” t-shirt, (she loved that beach, now) because class was over and she could , minding her own business because as THE senior soprano in all her divaness (my word), she had already claimed her favorite lesson schedules for voice and organ and had a few days to kill while all the freshmen and other underlings scrambled for times (actually she was bored and sizing up the new-comers, but the other sounded so much better.) Geeky blond-haired boy really laid it on thick asking brown-haired girl if she had room in her schedule to be his accompanist for voice master classes, department recital days, and semester juries (the musician’s version of exam, when the department faculty could ask you to perform ANY piece you had worked on that semester, and quiz you on composer, intended interpretation, translations of foreign texts, yadda yadda yadda.) Brown-haired girl was amused, because it was apparent his housemates had already warned him to be very, very nice, but don’t act like you are coming on to her in any way, because she could go from sweet to psycho in the flutter of an eyelash in true Southern fashion. Lo, and behold, it wasn’t long until these two were best friends, JUST friends….
Yes, just friends, because at the time these two were dating the other’s best friends and roommates-crazy, huh! But God had heard the brown-haired girls plans for her life, HER PLANS, and He had to have laughed. And then, He spoke over her, “Daughter, I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare, not for the disaster you have planned (my words interspersed here), to give you a future and a hope.” Fourteen months, a broken engagement (hers), an all-night phone conversation after a youth choir tour concert at his father’s family church (which brown-haired girl at the time did not know this little tid-bit) and an evening at the Lee County Fair in which the two best friends finally realized while riding the Spider that they were totally smitten with each other, and these two were engaged. And six months later, this happened:
And that is the story of how the brown-haired preacher’s daughter did what she had sworn she’d never do…..became a brown-haired worship pastor’s wife. God knew all along…and their love story is still being written one day at a time after 28 years, 3 churches, 3 towns, 2 children, and 8 homes.
Front Pew Piano Side 