Helen and Sam
To a distant observer, Helen’s household might have seemed like any typical family of five, with her parents and two brothers going about their daily lives. But inside, the house was quiet. It was the kind of quiet that felt heavy, not peaceful. Love was not a word people used there. There wasn’t any touching. Helen has no recollection of her parents sleeping in the same room. They seemed to live parallel lives under the same roof, never colliding with one another. Helen wondered quietly and often what love was supposed to look like.
Her mother met a man who provided the emotional stability she associated with love, prompting her to leave Helen's father. They divorced shortly after, and Helen’s mother married that man. This was when Helen was in middle school. Growing up without affection, Helen became desperate for it and started dating during her sophomore year of high school. The attention and affection that she received as a teenager in her dating relationships could have been assuaged a little bit if she had experienced some physical affection from the people in her life who should have been giving it to her.
Helen dated the same boy through her freshman year of college. Although physically tempted, she held back, hearing her mother’s voice in the back of her head telling her that sex was like a bag of chips: “You tell yourself one chip is enough, but you always end up wanting more.” If she was willing to have sex with one boy, she was likely to have sex with others too. Fear of getting pregnant also caused Helen to wait, until the temptation finally became too strong after a few years, and she gave in.
They eventually broke up when he moved away to college. In a short time, he married another woman, got divorced from her, and then started interacting again with Helen during her junior year in college. Helen married him within a year after his divorce. She said that if she would have had someone speaking wisdom into her life, she would have avoided the marriage. Her parents offered no real support. Despite concerns about his character, rather than guiding her away from a possible mistake, they told her what she wanted to hear and urged her to marry him. They were married for a year, but during that time, he was unfaithful, and she came to realize there were other disturbing sides to him she hadn’t seen before.
Helen said she got married to him out of guilt because she was already sleeping with him and wanted to make it right. She knew she shouldn’t be having sex outside of the confines of marriage. Because of her upbringing, Helen didn’t know what a real relationship should look like. She deeply desired to have her own family. She longed for the whole package but struggled to believe that God could truly give her something so great. Her brief marriage mirrored the one she witnessed as a child – her husband was nothing more than a roommate.
At some point the Lord had gotten a hold of her. She began attending church regularly. She knew she should stop drinking. Helen also sought counseling to understand why she was drawn to men like her ex-husband and how to deal with other emotional issues.
She recalls once when she and a date returned to her apartment, and as they became physical, she began to feel unsafe. She told him that she didn’t know him that well, and fortunately, things between them came to a stop. When he left, Helen sat down on her couch and told God, “You have to put me in a bubble because I don’t know what to do or how to handle these situations.” Not one man had pursued her since that prayer. If a man talked to or engaged with her at all, she was completely obtuse to the whole thing. She also discovered that men who were father figures to Helen, such as her pastor at the time, were protecting her. “No, you leave her alone,” they would say to potential suitors.
In her early thirties, Helen felt more emotionally ready to date again. She began praying about being married. She felt that the Lord showed her a lot of things about healthy marriages, even though there was no man in her social purview who was single, her age, and whom she was interested in. As Helen drew closer to God, she knew that He was revealing to her that she would be married again and would have children. She had visions of them, where she would not see their faces but would sense their presence and know they were her family. As an act of faith, Helen started preparing her house for a family and even felt led by God to start writing her future husband letters when she was dealing with the emotions of wanting him to be there already. She trusted that God would bring her the right man at the perfect time.
She had been using the eHarmony dating app and was direct in her response to a man who asked her out for a second date. “To be honest,” she told him, “We’ve been sitting here drinking a cup of coffee for two hours, and you’ve been complaining about your family the whole time. I don’t want to be a member of that family. I would rather not be the one that you complain about in five years. Think about what I’m saying and think about what you’re doing.” She decided not to use the dating app any longer and stopped paying for the service. She found she was not interested in men like she had been before. She only wanted who God wanted for her.
There was a man in Georgia named Sam who saw a free promotion one weekend for the eHarmony dating app and thought he’d give it a try. He wondered who some of his potential matches were. During that time, Helen had been traveling back and forth from her home in Indiana to Tennessee to help one of her brothers with a family matter but found herself free that same weekend when eHarmony ran the special offer. She wondered who some of her potential matches were.
Sam and Helen met for free on eHarmony and began a long-distance relationship. It was during this time that Helen’s ex-husband tracked her down and asked her to forgive him for all the hurt that he caused and for all that he lied about in the past. He asked if they could be friends. She told him she knew she would remarry and said to him, “I am pretty sure that my husband will not want you to be in my life. So, no, you and I cannot be friends. We cannot be in contact. Not even from afar.”
Meanwhile, while Sam and Helen were getting to know one another, they emailed for the first month or so, and then he asked if he could call her on the phone. She remembered that she liked his voice when she heard him for the first time and felt like the Lord was telling her that he was the one. She thought she was just making it up in her head because how could he be the one if they only just recently met on the Internet and just started talking on the phone? Sam told her he wanted to meet her, but she was extremely leery of the whole situation. She knew it was time, but she had been hurt so much from past relationships and was scared. They continued talking and using FaceTime to communicate for a few more months. They talked every day. She finally went ahead and agreed to meet Sam.
He went to college later in life and would soon be graduating. She was a teacher and was already starting summer break. He took the trip to Indiana in May to meet her and spent a week there so that they could get to know one another. Helen was scared and uncomfortable. She told him she was not going to kiss him and was not going to be affectionate with him; she was not interested in any of that. She told him, “If you’re interested in me, then you’re just going to have to deal with it because I don’t know for sure.” He went back to Georgia not knowing at all if she was even interested in him.
Sam had been involved in past romantic relationships, but they never led up to intercourse. He endeavored to remain pure for his future bride. He was raised in a Christian home but did not see a lot of demonstration of purity growing up. His parents had also divorced when he was a teenager, and he also did not have any role models that demonstrated a loving marriage relationship.
As their relationship progressed, Helen and Sam agreed not to do anything physical beyond kissing each other. Period. There was a very stark line. Helen did not want this relationship to be like all of her others. They both didn’t want any indiscretion before the Lord. As a child, Helen read through the Bible and was well aware that sex was reserved for marriage, but there were numerous times growing up that she would stumble in this area. She remembers the Holy Spirit telling her that what she was doing was wrong and giving her the chance to put an end to things, but eventually she just ignored the promptings. The Lord always gives us a way out, but we have to decide on our own to listen to that voice inside of us. Helen had finally reached a place in her life where she wanted to do things right. She wanted to do things God’s way.
Helen admits that both she and Sam knew on their first phone call that the Lord was putting both of them together, but they were both nervous about how the relationship would progress, having seen their parents go through unstable marriages. They wanted to be assured that they were both hearing from God and wanted to feel comfortable about where the relationship was heading.
In June, Helen went to Georgia to visit him for a week. She was staying at his aunt’s house, and there was a big birthday party for Sam that month. He was a youth pastor at his church, and so the head pastors were like parents to him. They demonstrated to him what a healthy marriage looks like. Helen remembers the pastor’s wife cross-examining her about her character, and she wondered why this stranger was asking all sorts of probing questions. Helen didn’t know it at the time, but the pastor’s wife had been praying for more than ten years for the Lord to bring Sam a wife, so she was examining Helen since she was the girl who traveled all the way from Indiana to visit him.
It was during that trip in June that Helen and Sam discussed marriage. They had talked on the phone for a total of six months. There were a couple more back-and-forth trips, and then at the end of July, before she had to start teaching again, she made another trip to Georgia, and that’s when Sam presented her with a ring and proposed. She continued teaching in Indiana and then resigned from her position on Thanksgiving and moved to Georgia. They got married the following December. They were both in their thirties and agreed that a long engagement was a moot thing, especially since they knew they were hearing from the Lord and past hurts had been healed.
The night before their wedding, Helen gave Sam the stack of letters that she had written him months before ever meeting him, letters she had written in faith that God would fulfill His promise to her. Helen and Sam have four children, two boys and two girls, ranging in age from five to ten. As a child, Helen doesn’t recall even her grandparents hugging or kissing or even touching each other. In her family, you only got a hug if something bad happened. She has memories of wanting to be close to her mother and her mother pushing her away. Sam’s family was the complete opposite. He grew up with many healthy hugs. The Lord knows what He’s doing when He brings a husband and a wife together. Helen now makes it a point to snuggle often with her children. To a distant observer, it is evident that this family is wrapped in the arms of a loving Father, and they share that love with one another.
