Choosing Our Own Way
Learning to trust the life that was calling me.
After graduating from college, I was almost immediately pulled back into the life I had begun trying to outgrow.
My father offered me a position in his company at a salary far greater than anything I had found on my own. Once again, he seemed determined to prove that a college degree had little value in the practical world of earning a living.
Yet the position required me to teach classes, and he readily told people I was qualified because I had taught biology labs in college. I never believed he was proud of me. My accomplishments seemed easier for him to value when they reflected well on him.
For the most part, I liked the job. Still, I enrolled in a master's program at night, desperate to keep open the world I had discovered in education.
The people around me persuaded me that an MBA was the sensible choice. Business degrees were opening doors for women in the 1970s, and everyone seemed certain that this was the direction I should take.
The only problem was that I hated the MBA classes.
They spoke to a person I was never going to be.
Eventually, I left the program and entered another uncertain season. I had a degree, a job, and more independence than I had ever known, yet I felt as though I were barely keeping my head above water. I was living in the adult world without any clear sense of where I belonged within it.
Then I met the man who would become my husband.
He was a friend of one of my colleagues. When he first asked me out, I declined. Dating someone connected to work seemed unwise, and I had learned to be cautious about letting people too close.
He asked again.
One day, he looked directly into my eyes and gently asked whether I would go on a date with him. I hesitated, but there was something in that moment that invited me to put down my defenses.
I said yes.
Neither of us could have known then what that small answer would set in motion. Yet now, after forty-seven years of marriage, we both recognize that moment as something more than chance. God was quietly joining two lives that might never otherwise have found one another.
Our path toward marriage was not easy.
His family did not approve of me, and my family did not approve of him. Both sides had reasons, warnings, and firm opinions about why we were not suited for a future together.
In an unexpected way, their disapproval strengthened our resolve.
Our families had often judged us through expectations and labels rather than truly seeing who we were. Their certainty that we were wrong for one another made us wonder whether, perhaps, we were finally choosing something right for ourselves.
So we chose each other.
We came from very different backgrounds. Mine had been shaped by inner-city living, divorce, chaos, and disorder. There was little structure or consistent discipline, and much of the time I felt more like the parent than the child.
His childhood had unfolded in a working-class suburban neighborhood, where his parents stayed married. His mother was home, dinner appeared on the table each evening, routines were dependable, and discipline was rigid.
The outward details of our childhoods were different, yet each of us carried a quiet understanding that life did not have to remain as it had been handed to us.
We believed change was possible.
We also knew no one else could create it for us.
That belief became part of the foundation of our marriage. Together, we began building the kind of home and family life we had each longed for in our own way. We raised two sons, traveled, faced difficult seasons, and gathered memories that still live tenderly within us.
We did not escape every pattern we inherited. We were young, imperfect, and still learning ourselves. But for the first time, I was no longer trying only to break away from the life behind me.
Together, we were beginning to build something new.
Years later, that shared willingness to choose a different path would carry us far from Texas, toward an uncertain future in Montana and beyond.
But first, God had brought us together.
