Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [13]
I ran to the dorm room that Steve and Herbie shared, crying.
Herbie opened the door, looking confused at first, then concerned.
“Herbie!” I yelled. “I’ve really upset your brother, and you’ve got to help me find him!”
Herbie took me to one of Steve’s usual spots where he would go to be alone. Sure enough, there was Steve in the white Cutlass, just sitting in the driver’s seat, pounding the steering wheel, praying and sobbing.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said to me. “My parents have prayed for my spouse-to-be ever since they came to faith, and I’ve always prayed, ‘God, prepare me for the one you have for me, and prepare her for me.’ And if I’m completely honest, I mainly hoped for two things: that my future wife would have a great figure and that she would be a virgin!”
Staring at Steve through my own tears, part of my brain thought, Youprayed that? Isn’t that kind of hard to find in the same person?
But then we cried together and I told him how much I cared for him and how very sorry I was that I had hurt him. Steve ended up feeling more compassion than anger as we talked about how alone I had felt, unable to go to anyone to share what I was going through. We talked about our future and how we would “start new” with God’s forgiveness. We cried and prayed some more . . . and somewhere, through that long night, we came to a place of peace.
A few months later, during spring break at his parents’ house in Paducah, Kentucky, Steve took me to a park gazebo. He sat me up on the railing and asked me to marry him.
I quickly said yes and laughed. Back then we had a game we would play with each other. Steve would ask me a hundred times a day to marry him, and as fast as I could, I would answer yes.
I thought this was like any of those other times. But then, as I put my hand on his chest to jump down off the railing, I could feel his heart thumping wildly.
This was the real proposal!
Out from behind his back came a little red jeweler’s box. I started crying.
“Yes!” I sobbed.
“Aren’t you going to open the box?” he asked.
Steve had just gotten a royalty check for a song he’d written that had been recorded by the Imperials . . . and so he had splurged and bought me a $900 ring. I cried some more, we kissed, and then we began to plan our future together.
He’d been told that he needed to be in Nashville to further his chances in the music industry, and so we decided together that I’d drop out of Anderson and he’d enroll at Belmont University. I had already realized that nursing school was not for me – since it involved vomit and bedpans. And my parents were kind enough to understand how I felt . . . particularly since I was moving on and they wouldn’t have to pay for three more years of college.
Steve and I got married at my home church in Ohio on October 13, 1984. The reception was in the church hall, with nuts, mints, ham and chicken salad and pimento cheese triangles my mother had made, and a lovely cake with a Precious Moments bride and groom perched on top.
They looked a little more confident about their future than we did.
We had a grand total of fifty dollars in our bank account and no time for a honeymoon, so we spent our wedding night at a Clarion hotel in Cincinnati. We thought it would be cool since it had a rotating restaurant on the top. Then we went to the Cincinnati Zoo, where the zoo staff let us in for free since our green Ford Pinto was still covered in sticky gobs of shaving cream, bedraggled streamers, and a “Just Married” sign.
While this is a lovely zoo, I don’t necessarily recommend it for a honeymoon. It was pouring rain that day, and all the animals were hiding in their habitats, depressed. As we strolled in the rain, we realized we were about as far apart in personality as two people could be. We cried together on the drive back to Nashville. The wedding was over, and reality was upon us.
We had known some of this while we were dating, of course, but dating is the Land of Magical Thinking. Once we had moved to the Land of Matrimony,