When my wife, Doris, was a young girl, she would pray asking the Lord to give her a husband that loved her, to have a child, and that we would worship the Lord together. We were both in our 30’s in 1988 when we got married in the Lutheran Church she had attended all of her life. This was her first marriage and my second. We moved into our home across the road from her mom and a little over a year later our son was born and we were attending the Lutheran Church she grew up in. God had answered her prayers, or so she thought.
The Lord was about to turn her dreams upside down. In the early 1990’s, the Lord started talking to me on Sunday mornings during the services asking me questions. Jesus said, “No man can come to him except it were given unto him of my Father” (John 6:65). These Sunday morning talks were my wake-up call. They put a desire in my heart to seek out and to know the real truth about God and Jesus. I started going to an Old Testament class taught by brother Earl Pittman where God was letting me understand what I was reading as never before. Within a year, in 1996, I had left the Lutheran Church and started attending home prayer meetings led by Pastor John Clark, never looking back. On November 10, 1998, I received the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in an unknown tongue. During this time, my wife continued going to the Lutheran Church and she thought her dreams as a young girl were shattered. Our marriage started to deteriorate. There was tension in our home. I was happy and excited about what the Lord was showing me through Pastor John’s teaching, and she was miserable. She came to two prayer meetings and said she would never go back. When I would try to tell her the wonderful things Jesus was showing me, it was like running into a brick wall. She wanted no part of it. It had gotten so bad that the Lord finally told me it was not between me and her; it was between her and him. That was a relief to me. I didn’t feel that I had to say anything else to her about the new and wonderful truths the Lord was letting me see. For four years God made her life more and more miserable. She couldn’t enjoy going to the Lutheran Church and she wasn’t happy at home.
Unbeknown to me, the Lord was working on her and her breaking point was about to come. Paul said in 1Corinthians 7:14 that the love for God of a believing spouse would sanctify the unbelieving spouse, and the unbelieving spouse would come this way. She loved me, and that was the only thing keeping our marriage together for those four years. She had become so miserable by early 2000, she tried to bargain with me. She told me she would go with me to our meetings every other Sunday, if I would go with her every other Sunday. I told her that it sounded good to me, that she go with me, but there was nothing at the Lutheran Church for me to go back to. She pouted for a while, and in June, she gave in to going with me one Sunday a month. During the next five months with Pastor John’s teachings, Jesus opened her eyes, her ears and her heart to see the truth. In September, the Lord spoke to her while she was attending the Lutheran Church and asked her what she was still doing there. That day she left and never went back. She thought it would be hard because she had attended there over forty some years, and most of her natural family went there, along with our neighbors, but God has made it easy. One year later, after coming to her first meeting in June, on June 19, 2001, she received the Holy Ghost. We were finally equally yoked in marriage and in worship. Our marriage has grown and progressively gotten better and better and better. We have had our ups and downs, and Pastor John has given us counsel to keep us on the strait and narrow way. Today, we have the best marriage, and are happier than we ever imagined.
Randell and Doris