For my wife and I, it was a process.
I was living overseas when I met my wife. Leading up to it, a year or year and a half before I had the first conversation with my wife, someone said she'd prayed for me and had seen a vision of my wife. So I prayed based on that verse, "The things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever." I said if He had indeed shown someone a vision of my wife, that it's out of the bag and belongs to 'us' and that means me, too, and if she's going to be my wife, I want to see a vision of her too. Then I had one. It wasn't the three-D, like you are there type vision. I've never had that. Just a picture in my mind's eye. I don't really think in pictures much, and I kind of dream almost in cartoon. My visual memory and things like that are on the weaker side and I'm stronger on verbal and abstract type thinking, probably. Anyway, my point is I don't get pictures in my mind all the time.
So I saw this woman, an Asian woman with kind of bush eyebrows, and a sweaty or oily face, actually. That doesn't sound too appealing. It's like the vision started around the eye and focused on that and came out a bit. I struggled to remember the look of the face. It's like I just got a glimpse. It wasn't enough to identify the person at first sight later, but a couple of details stood out.
Some time later, I was teaching at a school, and there was a girl in the back of a crowded classroom. I taught all grade levels except the 3-year-olds because that wasn't working well for the English classes I was doing. So I was in the 4-year-old class, classes scheduled back to back with kindergarten classes that day, with no break in between. I forgot some materials in the class and had to rush to kindergarten class. When I came back in, the teacher briefly introduced me to a new potential assistant teacher. I had to leave. Later that day, I saw her, not realizing it was her, with her church sticker on her briefcase. She looked so pretty. I wondered if God would give me a wife as pretty as that. Then I told myself I had to get back to work. She stopped working there. I didn't know this at the time, but the job conflicted with her schedule as a college student.
The month I met her, I believed the Lord may have told me that that month I'd meet my wife. I'd started praying hard about it. Asking the Lord if he had someone for me just to speed things up to let us be together. I'd made it a serious point of prayer. I'd prayed about it for a long time, but not like that.
So about a year later or so, I meet this same girl on her Bible college campus when I visited to library. A missionary there from the same state I had lived in had invited me to his apartment on campus for dinner over a break and told me about the library. The woman came in and we looked at each other. Later, she came back downstairs where I was at, and sensed the Lord wanted her to speak to me. But she said she was a shy Asian girl, and didn't want to introduce herself to a man like that. But I was talking with her friend who was holding a guitar, so she sat next to him and ask if he could play a certain song. So I introduced myself to her. She got a word of knowledge about my ministry that fit well with what I knew about myself and my gifts. I gave her my phone number and forgot to ask hers.
She'd actually had a vision about herself and a western man earlier, too. That day, she went home and wrote a prayer asking for us to be together. I went home and asked if this woman was going to be my wife.
It took us a while to establish contact with each other due to people where I lived not passing messages, and maybe a bit of hesitation on her part about calling a man. She had hoped to just leave a message. The guy intercepting the messages, possibly to hit on her or someone else, finally put a message with her number on my door. We started talking on the phone, and after a week or two of busy schedules, started eating dinner together every single night. In spite of not speaking each other's languages all that well, we really connected. It was just so easy to get along and we enjoyed talking to each other, even if we had some misunderstandings because we'd each try to say things the other didn't understand.
So we started out as 'just friends.' It's funny thinking back. During early telephone conversations, it's like we both suspected or believed the other would be our marriage partner, were kind of trying to feel the other out to see if the other thought the same way without showing our cards that each of us thought that. That was kind of how it went after our first conversation.
I was praying about whether to marry her. It seemed like when I prayed the Lord was answering me yes, this was the oman I was supposed to marry. I kept praying the same thing until it seemed like the Lord was saying yes, why don't you believe Me? Ouch. One time my wife got upset on the phone, and I prayed and asked why, and got this back story about her of why she was upset. The next time we talked, she told me the story I'd got in prayer, which confirmed to me that I was hearing something and it wasn't just my imagination.
So I kept on praying about it, but there was 5% doubt or so, or 3% or so, enough to make it hard to go ahead and propose. I had an American friend who told me his decision-making process, which involved just trusting God and making a decision and telling God your plans and your reasons and trusting Him to make things work out. I got similar advice from a missionary friend. He said sometimes He'd pray and not hear anything from the Lord about a decision, decide, and then get correction not to do that.
So I prayed like that, told the Lord why I believed I should propose to this woman and why I believed it was His will, told Him I was going to, and if He didn't want me to let me know or stop me. Then I had 100% peace and assurance about it, that it was the Lord's will. I would have loved to have gotten a confirming prophecy before I made my decision (and there were some reasons for that that I'm not sharing here), but I didn't. But after I made that decision, maybe the same day or the next day, I picked my wife up returning from a missions trip and we went to a service that night. Then the speaker, who hadn't seen me since I'd met her, prophesied over us about us going to many different places and ministering to many different people, which, to my mind, implied marriage since we'd be together for so long. I asked him if he were afraid to give prophecies like that. He said he used to be, but not anymore.
It was a bit of a process on my end. My wife didn't tell me at the time, but later she said she knew from that time we had that first conversation. After we got engaged, she showed me the prayer she'd prayed about us being together the night after that first conversation. She also talked about how she jumped up and down and danced around with joy after I called her for the first time. It's fun to hear that stuff later, and to remember how reserved we both were about sharing those kinds of thoughts when we started talking to each other on the phone and dating.
