Another Friday, August 3: Looking back 23 Years

August 3rd is a date that is forever stuck in my memory bank. It is the date Jim and I first left the U.S. to go to Guatemala with baby Christopher back in 1986. Two years earlier, to the date, we had met for the first time in Norman, Oklahoma, where Jim was studying linguistics at the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

That was a Friday I will never forget. I had completed one semester of Linguistics training in the spring, and I was working two different summer jobs teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in Dallas. One of my linguistics instructors, an older woman named Peggy Wendell, had asked me to accompany her to Norman for the weekend for a fun time of Mock (Missions) Olympics and to meet some other future Wycliffe Bible Translators. At the same time, two other friends urged me to make the trip. One was Sylvia (far left in the photo), and the other was Tim (a childhood/ college buddy next to me on the far right in the photo). I went.

Friday night the group in the photo went on what is now an infamous camping trip in which Jim and I became acquainted. It was uncanny how our lives were on parallel courses at that point. We both experienced that reality along with more than a casual attraction, which caused us to wonder what the future held for us. The amazing thing was that Jim had the exact same vision for serving the Lord in a Spanish-speaking country, not as a translator, but as a literacy worker who would focus on promoting the completed New Testament translations, which is what I had planned to do.

That, folks, is the humble beginning of our life together. Obviously things moved fairly quickly after that. Jim moved to Duncanville, Texas, where I was living, and we were in all the same fall classes for our second semester of linguistics training. Every waking hour of the day we were together for three months. We were married on the last day of classes in December, continued studying in the spring, had our first child exactly nine months and twelve days after the wedding, and left for Jungle Camp three months after that. By the following August 3rd, we had raised our financial support, and were off to the mission field.

As my mom says, "never a dull moment" after that.