God is Good!

It's hard to believe that so many years have passed and I have been fortunate enough to be married to someone as wonderful as Max. We married after knowing each other for only a few short months and let me tell you - God took good care of us in that!

We met in January of 1994 online in an old Chat forum on the General Electric network - GEnie. It was completely text based and in that day and age there was only 2400 baud modems (up from the 300 and 1200 baud modems that I had started with when I first got on GEnie in 1987. I always spent my time online using the handle "Isolde Malory". I had a fascination with Thomas Malory's Arthurian saga and the opera "Tristan und Isolde" was just another tragedy that attracted my soul.

Max saw me enter that chat system on that fateful Sunday afternoon and asked about my handle. We talked for a few minutes - and I took off - he was in private session with another woman. I went away for a week because I had some personal things to deal with, but when I showed up the next week online, he said "hello" to me again. We began talking and I realized that this man was brilliant! He was extolling the benefits of the Eneagram and when I asked what it was, I was given a long, well worded description. We talked for hours that night and then met online every night after that, finding out more and more about each other.

A month passed and I finally got the courage up to ask if he would like to talk via telephone. I was really nervous. (Remember, this was 1994 - times have changed! <grin>). I finally got his phone number from him and called him. We talked for a short time on the telephone. I had a cold and was rasping at him, but he didn't seem to mind. Over the next month we talked online a lot and via telephone. All of a sudden we were no longer strangers. We were pouring out our lives to each other and talking about some of our deepest dreams. He mailed some of his amazing black and white photographs to me to show me what his passion was.

I took those prints with me to a CFO Prayer Retreat. These people had been praying for years for me to find the right man in my life. I was so excited to be able to share that I believed God was bringing this man into my life and it was time to be open about it. Both Max and I knew that God was the force behind us coming together. He had been praying for a woman that would be his companion and all of a sudden here I was. I was a Christian and I had been praying for my husband as well.

The two of us knew that there was no need to waste any more time. I flew down to North Carolina in March. Max met me at the gate at the airport and I knew immediately who he was. I felt like I was getting off the airplane after a long business trip and was finally at home. I knew this man so well. He took me out to dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant and then back to his apartment, which he had spent days cleaning up and had completely cleared out a room for me to sleep in. By the time I left North Carolina, I had transferred my mother's engagement ring from the right hand to the left hand and we knew that we were going to be married.

Max put in his resignation at his job and we began the process of organizing his move to Omaha. I flew back down in April and we packed everything up into a U-Haul and began the trek home. Let me tell you now ... a trip in a U-Haul hauling a vehicle across country teaches you a lot about a person. We made that trip with a little stress and a lot of conversation. And we continued to fall in love with each other. God's plan was in process.

We pulled into Omaha on Sunday, April 17. The next week was a whirlwind of activity. But, on Friday we traveled to my Dad's home in central Iowa. We picked up Max's mother, Rose in Des Moines; my brother and his family came in from Colorado; Carol came up from Omaha and Max's sister Kendra and her husband Dick flew in to join us for the wedding on Saturday. It was just a small group of us, but our lives had finally started together and we were simply thankful for that.