After one ChristianMingle date, I decided that I was not ready to date.  I still needed to heal from the recent death of my late husband. The chat rooms were great as they brought me in contact with other widows and widowers. I spent hours in the 50’s chat room both laughing and crying. One day, in August of 2009, I jumped to the main chat room to escape a conversation in the 50’s chat room. While there, I noticed Dan talking to the group, but he did not notice me. The next day, I again returned to the main chat room when I again was uncomfortable in the 50’s room. While there, Dan, whose nickname was Shyguy, entered the room. I greeted him with, “Hey Shyguy who is not so shy.”

He immediately responded to me and in the course of conversation took a look at my profile. I then looked at his profile and we discovered that we answered the same on the items that were the most important to us. It was the beginning of a whirlwind relationship. We soon discovered that we had a lot of things in common.  We are both Baptist preacher’s kids. Dan had also lost his wife three years ago, had been praying for a new love for a while and was just waiting for her identity to be revealed. He was convinced in a few days, that I was the one God had in mind.

I learned very quickly that Dan is not shy when it comes to pursuing God’s will. I loved how much he loved God. He prayed with me the first day he called me on the phone, and we have not missed a day of praying together since. He made arrangements to fly from North Carolina to Houston, TX to meet me in person over Labor Day weekend. We had prayed about things and knew that if there was a spark when we met in person, we would know that this was God’s will. I was very nervous when I met him at the airport, so I hid behind a plant until I saw him. When we met, he hugged me for about 5 minutes. We knew. Before he returned to North Carolina, he asked me to marry him. He didn’t feel that we could announce our engagement if I didn’t have a ring, so we didn’t become officially engaged until after I flew to North Carolina on October 7th.

The original plan was to get engaged on October 8th and pick up a marriage license to use when I returned in November. We were to marry November 22nd, and then honeymoon over the Thanksgiving holiday. With the marriage license in hand and the difficulties in finding places to stay while visiting him in North Carolina, the temptation to go ahead and get married was overwhelming. Later that day, we went down to the Polk County Jail and asked the Magistrate to marry us. We didn’t tell anyone we were married until we went to church on Sunday and Dan, who was leading singing at his church, introduced me as his wife. It isn’t easy being married to someone who lives 1,000 miles away, but we will hopefully be together in Texas full time soon. I don’t know how we would survive without the ability to web-cam every day. The sad part of our union is that we have to leave ChristianMingle. I will never forget the wonderful people here who helped me deal with my grief or the ones who just made me laugh. It is great to be surrounded by fellow Christians. There is nothing like it.

Thank you, ChristianMingle.com for our wonderful success story!