Because this is my first blog post, I decided to start at the beginning from when I first realized that I was living inside the testimony.  So I’m starting in 6th grade, when I met my future husband. Not that we really knew we had started living inside the testimony, but many years later when I wrote my first book in 2009, it became abundantly clear!

But for now, this is how I met my husband, and how we began living inside the testimony together.

1976: Boy meets girl (a basketball player and cheerleader) in 6th grade. Nothing happens.

1978: Another basketball player/friend of boy asks boy who is now in 8th grade if he likes girl. For the first time, boy looks at girl and decides, YES, I like her. So girl started “liking” him too. They start talking.

1978-1979: Somewhere along the way, boy and girl fall in love. They’re not sure when it happened, somewhere between 8th and 9th grade. Definitely by high school, boy and girl are a real couple.

Boy and Girl in 9th Grade on Homecoming Court (1979)

1979-1980: Boy and girl kiss under the breeze-way for the first time at a varsity football game. Boy escorts girl on the homecoming court and take really cute picture that girl posts on Facebook many years later without boy knowing it. (Boy still does not have a Facebook account.) Girl cheers for boy who plays freshman football and basketball. Boy and girl profess their love for each other… Later in 9th grade, boy and girl break up. (fake-audio with sad music playing)

1980-1983: Blah, blah, drama, drama, typical high school romance, off and on, boy and girl can’t quite work things out… Boy bought girl a ring at the carnival/fair, but girl would not accept it…(Girl still thinks this is so funny that boy bought it at a carnival!) Eventually boy and girl realize it will never work out and high school graduation is upon them. They both know it’s time to go their separate ways, and they will likely never see each other again. Girl wonders what it will be like to never see boy or hear boy’s voice ever again. Boy considers moving across country to where one of his sisters live to get a fresh start, and girl is planning to attend local university in a few months. (2,000 miles apart)

May 16, 1983, just 4 days before high school graduation: Boy suffers life threatening head injury, he goes to ER, but is sent home… to die… (fake-audio with dramatic music playing while I reiterate boy was sent home to die)

May 17, 1983: Boy’s sister who is a nurse knows something is not right as boy is losing consciousness at home. She takes boy back to hospital (different hospital) and boy is rushed away to have life saving emergency brain surgery to remove epidural hematoma blood clot that would have killed him had he not been taken back to the hospital within a few hours.

May 18-May 29: Something happens to girl while boy spends the next 2 weeks in the hospital. She doesn’t really recall the details, but suffice it to say, girl goes running to the hospital to see boy whose heart she had broken in high school and is afraid of what she may see or what may happen when she walks in his ICU room for the first time. She leaves her broken heart shattered in 1,000’s of pieces all over the ICU floor. However, boy’s father always said from that moment until the father passed away in 2011 that girl saved boy’s life! (Girl smiles as she thinks about her father-in-law and what he said all those years ago, and for all the many years he said it afterwards.) Boy and girl realize while boy is still in the hospital that they will never be apart again!!! That’s when they discovered the true meaning of “til death do us part,” and it was an overwhelming, surreal feeling that those two 18 year-olds simply could not bear.

May 29, 1983: Boy is discharged home after missing graduation, but thank the Lord, and even more importantly, his life was saved. He was reunited with his first love, the girl who was really feeling remorseful and so extremely hurt over what happened in high school. She often wonders what would have happened to her if boy would have died on 5/16/83 when he was almost fatally assaulted by a former classmate. The thought of that still gives girl a headache to this very day. Boy still carries the ear-to-ear scar in his scalp from where the neurosurgeon had to cut and pull back his scalp to perform the surgery. It’s hidden beneath his hair, but boy and girl both know it’s there.

Boy and Girl at Their 30-Year Class Reunion (2013)

JANUARY 2014: That 18 year-old girl inside this 49 year-old woman still thinks about what happened the last week of high school in 1983, and how her life would have been totally different if she would have lost that boy. She knows with utmost certainty that God saved that boy’s life just for her! So when you see her post that William is the absolute love of her life, you will understand why.

We’ve been living inside this testimony for such a long time, but it wasn’t until I wrote my first book that we realized it. ~ Betty