I've got a story.
My wife and I had our first conversation when I visited her Bible college campus in her country to go to the library and meet people. She said 'hi' before she went upstairs, because she was in a good mood. I'd just come from the library, which had a lot of English books, and I was downstairs in the cafeteria area. She came down from the library, and believed the Lord wanted her to go over to where I was, but didn't feel like it was appropriate to strike up a conversation with a guy. So she sat next to her classmate I was hanging out there with, and I struck up a conversation with her.
I'd been praying for a wife. I had been for a long time, but rather intensely for the few months before that. Looking back at my journal, from my prayer time, I believed the Lord had shown me that my wife would be 23 years old. I don't know if I remembered that when I met her, but looking back that was a pretty cool detail.
Before she met me, she'd been depressed because she was broken hearted from an ex-boyfriend from several months before. Her friend had just encouraged her, telling her what a woman of God she was, how she could do many things well, how pretty she was, and how the Lord could bring her a husband from anywhere in the world. (ahem.)
After our first conversation, my wife went home thinking I was the answer to her prayers. I went home and prayed about whether this woman was to be my wife. I wasn't sure right off. But I sure was thinking about it. I'd given her my number but forgot to get hers. So she called and left a message and eventually I got it. I called her back. She told me later she was jumping up and down for joy. Either the night after we met or the night after she called, she'd written down her prayer along the lines that we get married in her prayer journal.
Early on, we talked on the phone a lot because we were both busy and it was hard to meet. I was reading in my journal a little while back and basically we would have these conversations where each of us would kind of try to hint at our future together, basically whether the other sensed or heard anything from the Lord on the matter.
Then there were little clues along the way. She'd had a vision of me while standing at a bus stop before we met. Someone I knew from a prayer group at church said she'd prayed and seen a vision of my wife. So I prayed, "The things that are revealed belong to us and our children forever, and if they belong to us, I'm part of us, and I want to see the woman I will marry." I don't know about the other woman's vision, but when I prayed I saw this vision-- not the 3D kind where you are there, but the kind where you see a kind of picture in your mind-- of a woman's face, focusing in on her eye and panning out quickly. I noticed the eyebrows and a kind of shiny face (oily maybe.) Later, I saw an old picture of my wife's before she started plucking her eyebrows and remembered the vision. It made sense. And the other details matched up.
Also, when I prayed, I'd ask the Lord if this was the woman who should be my wife, and it seemed like I was getting an answer in my spirit, "Yes.' And later when I prayed, "Yes, why don't you believe Me?" (Ouch.) This was a really big decision, and it was an area where I needed to grow my faith.
There was also this verse that if I remember right, my wife said the Lord gave her for us, about the cord of three strands not being easily broken. Then someone else we knew spoke that over us. After we were married, at a wedding party in the US, a pastor my parents invited prayed a kind of prophetic prayer in which he quoted that verse and said that Jesus was the third strand.
I would have loved to have had a really direct prophetic confirmation before I decided to marry her. But I think the Lord was working on my faith and teaching me a little something about decision making. A friend of mine, an American, told me he made decisions by praying, "Lord if it isn't your will stop me." I thought that was about the most unspiritual advice I'd ever heard.
Then I had a long conversation with him. He said before he moved his family to Indonesia, he and his wife didn't have any other options as far as jobs went. The real estate market had tanked where they were, and they were losing money on rental properties. But his wife got a job offer in Indonesia where she was from. So he prayed about moving the family. He said when he made a big decision, he read the Bible to see if there were any principles that applied to the situation. He'd pray and see if the Lord gave him anything for direction. (He had some testimonies about specific words of knowledge, so I assume that was a possibility for him.) If not, he'd make a decision. And he'd pray, "Lord, this is the best decision I think I can make based on the wisdom you've given me and here's why.... and Lord if it's not your will, stop me."
I called a missionary friend a while later and he gave me very similar advice.
So my wife went away with her Bible college classmates on a mission trip for several weeks. During that time, I prayed about us getting married. I was already about 95% or maybe 99% sure about us getting married. Finally, right before she returned, a day or two before, I prayed to the Lord about asking her to marry. I told Him, these are the reasons why I believe we should get married, and "if you don't want Me to get married, either make it where I don't have peace about the decision or speak to Me about it. Otherwise, if You don't want me to do it, stop me." I had so much peace about it. I was 100% sure I was doing the right thing. That little bit of doubt left. It was all settled for me then. I was going to ask this woman to marry me, and she was going to be my wife. I needed to be confident, too, because it isn't easy to marry a woman from my wife's people group, or at least it wasn't easy for us to navigate collective extended family politics and everything else. We did get married. I proposed about five months after our first conversation. We got married that same year. We got married five months later.
In addition to seeking to know God's will in prayer, I got to know her and what kind of things she thinks about and values. I knew she loved to sing praise songs to God. She was dedicated to prayer. We discussed our beliefs about marriage (submission, for example). She feared the Lord. She was a virgin, (and so was I.) We had very similar beliefs when it came to issues of doctrine. I wanted to marry a woman who wouldn't divorce me. We'd had those conversations where I told her about how she had so many characteristics I'd desired and prayed for, and she told me the same things about me. I also seemed to fit one of those 'read your mail' type prophecies someone had given her years before. After I decided to proposed to her, I picked her up after her missions trip and we went to a church meeting that night. Someone prophesied about us something that implied that we would be together for a very long time. So that was good. I would have loved to have gotten that before I made my decision, but it was good that the Lord had it be a matter of me working through things with Him.
