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Topic: Beginnings (05/31/04)
TITLE: "I Now Pronounce You Man and Wife" By Annette Agnello 06/06/04 |
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The words, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” are ultimate beginnings aren’t they. But no one really begins there. The real starting words for my marriage were, “You’ve got Mail” It was a total Internet romance. How else could two lonely people from half a state away from each other ever meet?
When you’re from a small town there is nowhere to meet single Christians except church. And there it’s pretty slim pickings. At my church there were only two single men at the appropriate age. One was someone I would never be interested in; the other was pretty intense and had better things on his mind than me. But I took the lead from him because he had started looking to the Internet to find a woman to his taste. He brought one of his finds to church and I liked her. That started me thinking if it worked for Ken...
So I found a Christian singles sight and placed an add. For nearly a year I got responses most ended up to be a major disappointment. Some assumed if they answered the add they were a shoe in; it was like the lounge lizard trying to pick up girls in a bar. Those were easy to recognize as people to avoid. Some appeared promising at first but for one reason or another didn’t make the cut. There was even one man in his sixties who wanted to get married just to get a son, the woman didn’t matter other than as a brood mare. Finally I gave up on the add as a lost cause. Then I got one last answer.
Mario had wanted a family. Being a man of prayer he asked God for a wife. It was his birthday. He ended up on the Christian singles add where God picked me out of the list and told him this is the one. Later he would call me God’s birthday present.
Sadly, God didn’t tell me. The first letter got my attention because of one phrase in the way he described himself, that was enough to get me to respond to the letter but I wanted to get to know him slowly over time. He had God’s assurance that this was the one and proposed within a week. That almost got me to stop writing him anymore I thought he was one of those thinking they were God’s gift to women, which usually meant LOOSER! It must have been God, himself, who kept me answering the mail. Meeting him and a year and a half of daily letters had come before those words, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
Those words were the beginning of the rest of our lives together, but the beginning? That came earlier in the form of a blind date set up by God.