After the first conversation with my wife, I wondered if she was the answer to my prayer for God to send me a wife. I'd been praying rather intensely, and it seemed like the Lord was saying I'd meet her that month. My wife went home and wrote a prayer in her prayer journal, "Lord if it's your will, give me to him and him to me."
So we had this sort of connection between us when we had that first conversation. Later, we realized we'd met a year earlier. I was working at a Christian school in Indonesia teaching a supplemental English class to every grade level from pre-K up to 10th grade. It was preschool and kindergarten day. I left some materials in the four-year-old classroom and went back for them. The teacher introduced me to an assistant who had been in the back of the room. We shook hands and I left fast. I didn't realize it was her, but I went in the office to work. I looked down the long line of tables lined together and saw this beautiful young woman with a sticker from her church on her briefcase. I wondered if the Lord would give me a woman that pretty some day to be my wife.
She was dating someone at the time, so when she saw me, she thought I wasn't all that good-looking for a white guy.
She said she probably told herself that because she was dating another guy.
We forgot about each other. Then I visited her college campus. A missionary worked there was a professor and lived on campus. He'd invited me to dinner over Christmas break and suggested I visit the library. It was near where I lived, but off a little road hidden from view. So I road the little bus up there, just a few minutes away, to meet some other young people in their 20's like myself and to read the English books in the library like the missionary suggested.
My wife walked into the cafeteria area where I was hanging out with some students I'd just met. She had been down about something and her friend had cheered her up. She found out that the guy she'd been dating when she first met me had these other girlfriends, and she was really down about it. Her friend had told her this list of good things about herself, told her to look in the mirror and how pretty she was, and how the Lord could bring he a husband from somewhere else in the world, like China, or America, etc.
So she walks to campus. When she saw me, she said, "Hi, sir." She told me later she wasn't trying to flirt. She was just in a good mood and was saying, "Hi." I looked her going up the stairs to the library. Her friend whispered to her about me being cute, so she looked back at me and our eyes met.
Later, she goes downstairs and I'm with her friend Philemon, whose playing the guitar. She believes the Lord wants her to talk to me. But she tells the Lord that she's a shy Asian girl and doesn't want to approach a man she doesn't know like that. So she sits by Philemon and asks him if he knows how to play a praise and worship song. Then I struck up a conversation with her and introduced myself.
She got a word of knowledge for me. It fit with what I knew about my own spiritual gifts, which was good. We started talking about me going to her cell group. So I give her my phone number, but forget to get hers. Somehow I'd spilled a bottle of water in my backpack I had with me. She put it in the sun for me. I didn't get her number.
A couple of days later, I asked Yoel if he knew her. He mentioned to her that I'd mentioned her to him. She was wanting to call, for someone else to answer, and to leave my number. There was an office in the house I lived, and the already-engaged young man who answered the phone may have tried to chat her up and purposefully not passed on the number. I don't know. She called again and left a number and they put the message on my door.
We were both busy with church trips and/or ministry, and so we couldn't meet. We started talking on the phone and finally I got to start meeting her. In those days talking on the phone, I suggested we be just friends, which she didn't like and considered to be a bit presumptuous of me. She didn't like it because she didn't want to be just friends. And she considered it presumptuous because I would think that she might want something other than being just friends. But we both were trying to see if the other person was also suspecting we might have met our marriage partner.
My Indonesian wasn't so good and neither was her English. So it took us a long time for each of us to figure out we liked the other. She kept calling me 'brother.' I thought she was reminding me we were friends and not something more. I didn't know girlfriends called their boyfriends brother. I was older. She had to call me 'older brother' in her language. I got to the point where I felt like I was lying by introducing her as my 'friend' though I took her out for dinner every night and I liked her, and it seemed pretty clear to me that she liked me. So I asked her if she thought of me as just a friend, and she was afraid that I'd want to stop spending time with her, so it was hard to get her to have that conversation.
Then later, she says she wrote something in her journal about us when we met. I ask to see it, and she said, "It hangs up on our relationship." I thought, "Oh no, there is a hang up in our relationship." Then she got a dictionary. Hang is the same word as depend in Indonesian. She meant it depends on our relationship. She told me after she accepted my proposal of marriage.