My eldest daughter had married and in the Spring she and my wonderful first son-in -law came to visit. He bought the Sunday paper, something I did not do, and after they returned home the paper just hung about in the lounge room for about 3 weeks. I picked it up one morning to throw it out but since it was a lovely October morning and I had a bit of spare time before I needed to go to work, I sat in the pergola with a cup of coffee and flicked through the paper.
I thought, I’ll just flick through this and see what the news was before I trash it. I came across the Personal page where people posted little advertisements to meet others; I guess you could say it was the predecessor to Tinder. My first reaction was, Oh, only desperate people do this and I am not desperate but I’ll just have a little look for a laugh. Then I saw it. These few lines literally jumped off the page and I thought, My goodness, where do you find a person like that!
A lot of the content on the page was pretty shallow, people wanting to meet others for a good time, no strings attached, but this little ad contained words like Christian, old fashioned values, enjoys quality entertainment and literature, wanting to meet someone for dining out, quiet times and mature conversation. Yes, I still have that little piece of paper. Thirty words which changed my life! I am a Cast your bread on the waters type of person and I was moved to respond. I cannot recall really too much of my reply but it finished with I think I can handle the mature conversation. I popped my letter in an envelope. You do not deal directly with the person but send the letter to a PO box with a code and the person collects their responses. I had no idea where this person lived plus over 3 weeks had passed, surely he had meet someone by now and was getting to know them but I popped my letter in the mail box and forgot all about it.
A couple of weeks later, I received a telephone call from a man who spoke in a very lovely voice. He said, ‘You wrote to me ma’am.’
I responded, ‘Did I?’ I had forgotten all about the letter I had posted. Anyway, we began to converse. We discovered that we lived in adjoining suburbs and we agreed to have some more telephone conversations. In due course, P#5 invited me to have lunch with him. I thought this fellow is on the same page as me; he is asking me to meet him in broad daylight at a public place so I agreed to go.
And as they say, the rest is history. I had asked God for a Godly man, a man of integrity, a man who would love me and love my children. He had asked God for a Christian woman. We laugh, because we both got far more that we had bargained for with each other. And there is truth in that saying, be careful what you ask God for because you just might get it. I suspect that I would never have met P#5 except through this course of events. We moved in different circles and I doubt very much that our paths would ever have crossed. We are very, very different, we disagree on many things but on our common ground we are rock solid. We love and respect each other, we value the things that unite us and refuse to let the differences destroy us. P#5 often says he wishes he had met me thirty or more years ago but we both know we needed to go on separate paths of heartache to appreciate what we have together.
I thank God every day for P#5 and I regularly have to pinch myself. His solid and faithful love blesses me and has changed my life for the better in every way.
Way leads onto Way 