Charles and I met through ChristianMingle.com on November 25, 2010. We were married on December 19, 2010 and have continued to be crazy-in-love since then.
He is 61 and I am going to be 60 next month. I am married to the most amazing man and talented musician! There is no way we would have met without ChristianMingle. He was living in Jackson, Mississippi and I was in the Kansas City, Missouri area. God definitely used ChistianMingle.com to bring us together. Why, we even did a show last month for a Jewish organization and someone in the audience asked us during the show how we met, so we had the opportunity to tell them about ChristianMingle.com. What a blessing!
I joined on November 7, 2010 and very shortly thereafter found my sweet husband’s profile. I immediately tried to contact him, all to no avail. I didn’t get any reply for several weeks and decided he must have either found someone else or just didn’t find me interesting enough to contact. As a matter of fact, I specifically remember one line I wrote in one of the messages I sent him. It said, “Unless you’re looking for someone younger, slimmer and blonder, pick me!”
I really felt when I saw his picture that the LORD was letting me see into Charles’ (Chuck’s) heart. Although I looked at hundreds (and I do believe it was hundreds) of other profiles over those three weeks, I kept coming back to his… wishing he would contact me.
Finally, on November 26th, I received a reply! I immediately replied and gave him my personal email. (I know, I know…it’s not recommended!) But I felt such peace in my spirit about it, that I had to! He then immediately responded…so I wrote back right then and gave him my phone number, in case he wanted to call. Still, great peace was in my heart about it all. My phone rang within moments after I hit “send.”
I’d been praying…never thought at my age that I would have anything to do with an online singles social site. As a matter of fact, when I nervously signed up, I’d told the LORD that if He had someone for me on ChristianMingle, I knew that He was more than capable of connecting us within 30 days. I didn’t feel I could spend $30 every month for an indefinite period of time, so I specifically asked the LORD to bring us together within that 30-day time frame, if that was where my husband was to be found.
Guess I’d better back up a bit. Six months before I’d ever even heard of ChristianMingle, I felt the LORD tell me that my husband was going to be coming in six months. I don’t know if you find that odd or believable, but that is what I heard in my spirit. That meant that my husband would be coming in December… Hmmm…
Back to our story. When Charles and I began talking on November 26th, it seemed that for the next three days, the only time the phone wasn’t glued to my ear was because we had to sleep, work or eat! I would be driving to my gigs, talking to this amazing man on the phone and hardly able to get through the shows quickly enough to get back to the phone. I actually missed my exits on more than one occasion, as we were so eagerly getting to know one another. For both of us it was the same. We knew…we KNEW from the start that this was GOD. The very first time I heard his voice, I knew it was the voice I’d been waiting to hear all my life. I’m a singer… but I didn’t know until I heard his voice that I’d been searching for THAT VOICE all my life.
Anyway, for a quick rundown of his side of the story, I’ll just say that he’d been on CM for a long time and was literally checking it for the last time before giving up. He says he had decided to move back to Pennsylvania, because he’d been asking GOD to give him a wife who 1.) loved the LORD and 2.) was a singer. (I jokingly – but seriously – asked him if he never found any singers on CM, to which he replied that he had, but they were not the right one.) He said he wanted to look ONE MORE TIME before giving up. And there was my email. He checked out my profile and decided I was worth paying for. I think he said he’d been on there for a couple of years, searching for me. I’m so glad he waited!!!
Within three days of our first phone conversation (November 26th) we decided we needed to meet. As I said before, he was living in Jackson, Mississippi and I live in Independence, MO (a suburb of Kansas City, MO). We pulled out our maps and checked mapquest.com. Cape Girardeau, MO was the halfway point. I had too many shows to just pick up and go, so we checked our calendars (he has an eBay business and was able to leave at any time). My first opening was December 9th, so we booked rooms at a hotel for that date.
As we waited for the day to arrive, we grew to know more and more about one another. Before we ever saw one another face-to-face, we KNEW we were going to be married. Charles told me in one conversation that he didn’t want to ask me to marry him over the phone. I replied that I didn’t want him to ask that way… we both knew he would propose in Cape Girardeau.
I booked a minister in Cape Girardeau for the wedding. We had decided to get married while we were there. Within an hour of arriving, he proposed. Within two hours of arriving, we were at a mall, looking for rings. Everything was moving so fast!
We had both arrived in town around 5:00 and the wedding was to be the next day – on December 10th. When we met the next morning, we picked up the license and on the way, I told the LORD that I was feeling overwhelmed and asked Him to touch Charles’ heart to wait until the following week when he would be moving to Missouri.
As soon as I asked the LORD (not out loud!), Charles turned to me in the car and said, “Honey, would you like to wait until I come next week, so your family can be at the wedding?” I said that I would, so we relaxed and spent the rest of the day doing music together. He’d brought one of his keyboards so we could see how we sounded as a duo Everything clicked musically as well. This is totally GOD…
When we said our goodbyes, Charles drove back to Mississippi, packed up his business and the rest of his things, called his son David in Nashville and made arrangements to have him drive one of the vans the following Saturday.
On December 18th, I sat in my car at the QuikTrip on Noland Road and watched my husband come up the ramp off of I-70 at 11:30 at night, pulling a rental trailer loaded down with his business and personal belongings, followed by his son in the other van (also packed to the ceiling) and I was reminded by Holy Spirit that He’d told me 6 months before…my husband was coming in 6 months.
It was December. I knew it had to be December – if that was GOD and not just my hopeful desires. Yes, it was 6 months. And he was here. I didn’t know that GOD meant he was literally coming from far away… Our GOD is amazing!
We know GOD used ChristianMingle to bring us together. We are a walking, talking, living, breathing advertisement for your company. I wasn’t kidding when I said in my last email to you that people constantly ask us how we met. We hear how perfect we are for each other…we hear it FREQUENTLY. We love how GOD used CM to bring two senior citizens together.