It was the Spring of 1969 and I was ending a four-year marriage and was an emotional and physical wreck.  I had three babies in diapers, one going through corrective surgeries for a disability.  My seventeen-year-old brother came to spend the summer with me to help me.  He brought home a young lady he said was the cutest little redhead he'd ever seen and she took one look at me and decided I'd meet and marry her brother.

When she introduced us we realized we'd already met six years earlier when my father and sister died in a drowning accident.  At that time my Grandfather's church held a special service for my family.  The preacher took advantage of the crowd and pointed a finger at me and asked me if I knew Jesus.  I was sitting in a strange church, surrounded by Aunts and Uncles and cousins I barely knew so I answered the only way that I could.  I said `yes!!"  He then asked me if I had accepted Him as my personal savior.  Like a Dummy I said "what?" And I was told, very vehemently, to get my rear up to the front of the church.  To this day I don't remember that walk.  I just remember beginning to breath again when I realized that the minister was "picking" on someone else because I felt someone stumble to his knees beside me.. and when I peeked it was a young man that I'd met earlier that day, a friend of my dead sister's.  Together we said the words the minister told us to say and accepted Christ into our lives.  

Almost seven years later, after he had joined the Army and gone off the Germany and after my failed marriage to another man, Aubrey and I were re-introduced by my brother's 'cute little redhead'.  That summer of 1969 was what I called "My Coming Out Party".  For the first time in my life someone saw someone of worth in me, a worth not tied to how I made him feel, but someone worthy of love.  We were married that winter, and remained married for 28 years, until the Lord took him home to him.