It Was All In God’s Plan!
We are a blended family that God brought together after our families experienced the greatest loss of our lives. I lost my husband Matthew to ALS in March 2013, and Glen (my husband now) lost his wife Harmony to breast cancer in April 2013.
Glen and I were childhood friends from a little town in Missouri, until I moved away to Colorado in 1983. I lived there until my late husbands diagnosis in 2010. After Matt’s diagnosis he moved us back to my hometown in Missouri.
God orchestrated Glen and I’s paths to cross again after 30 plus years in November 2013. Glen has five children, Michaela, Matthew, Micaiah, Malachi, and Mahlon. I have one son named Joshua, who is my miracle child because I was told I could never have children.
Now not only did God bless me with Josh, more blessings were added by giving me five more children and two precious grand-babies so far, Carson and Olivia, making my quiver full (for now)! My greatest joy in life is being a wife, mom, and Nana! I am truly blessed!
Stitched Together
Glen and I met in grade school, we were actually boyfriend and girlfriend a few times in 3rd and 4th grade. I would like to share how our paths crossed again.
It was in November 2013, My son was at school, I was home alone. Since I was bored, I did what everyone does to cure boredom. I logged onto Facebook.
Drama that lead to our contact.
While on Facebook I saw Glen’s name pop up on mutual friends page, showing he became recent friends with them. I’ll admit I was on that other page because he (our mutual friend) and his girlfriend were having a public breakup. And it was getting good!
When I saw Glen’s name pop up, I thought, hey there’s Glen! So I messaged him to ask if he remembered me from grade school. He was the only friend from back in the day that I hadn’t heard anything about in all these years. I often wondered, “what ever happened to Glen ?”
Contacting him eased my curiosity of where life took him. Isn’t Facebook great, for the most part? I have caught up with so many old friends and family by using it!
First Contact
Ok, back to my story, Glen emailed me back and let me know he remembered me. We emailed back and forth for hours that night. In our catching up, we found out that both of us were walking through the very same dark valley at the same time.
He lost his wife about 3 weeks after I lost my husband in the spring of that year. You can’t explain to someone who hasn’t walked through this, the pain of how it feels. It was nice to talk to someone who knew exactly what I was going through. It truly was a God send!
He asked Me Out? Lol
The time was getting late, we were tired, yet we didn’t want to say goodnight but needed to get some sleep. Before we said goodnight Glen asked me if I would meet him for lunch the next day. I felt hesitations to answer because I thought, what would others think? Also, I hadn’t seen this man in over 30 years he could be a closet serial killer for all I know. Yes my mind does think that way at times. I grew up in a larger city, and you can’t be so trusting these days either!
First Date
We agreed to meet at our local Mexican restaurant in town. At the end of the message Glen said, “It’s a Date.” I said to myself, the heck it is! LOL. This is because in my mind, and heart I was still very much a married woman, and that my husband was still my husband, he just went onto heaven and is waiting there for me. He is there, and so is Glen’s wife Harmony waiting for us one day. However, life continues to go on, ready or not.
Sharing With Each Other
You can see by the fact I am writing about him, and his children that I did go, and I am so happy I did! As Glen and I sat there, barely eating our lunch because of nerves. We talked about the past years of what we saw our spouses go through, what our kids went through, and then what we went through also.
Something I have learned in such great of loss as this, is you never really let go, you hold on to the hope of knowing you will see them again. Yet you never get over it, healing comes so you can move forward. You never get over the heartbreak of losing them!
Conversation about how we felt so helpless at the fact we had to watch them slip away and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. We talked and cried, the world around us seemed to disappear at that moment. We also talked about our lives after they went home to be with Jesus.
How We Coped
The two of us handled it differently, I surrounded my self with people from my church, and family who was there for me and my son through it all. Glen shut down and isolated himself from others in comparison to what I did. He didn’t talk about it with anyone. I don’t think I ever shut up about my late husband. Most the time I still talked as if Matt was still here, because there was NO way I was letting go!
Glen later shared with me of how he had been feeling like he was in a very dark hopeless place. A place of despair, he felt his life was over. He told me, that on the day that I sent an email to him, it happened to be the darkest day yet! Glen said that earlier in the morning he prayed and asked God to send someone that he could talk to. Someone to help him get out of this dark place! God heard his cries, and yep, it was me. It amazes me of how much our God loves and cares for us!
Second Contact. Lol
After that “date” we emailed constantly, then we went on more “dinner dates.” On one of those dates we walked around our city lake. We had just had lunch so we decided to go for a walk.
As we were walking Glen grabbed and held my hand. In my heart I felt something that I ended up sharing with Glen. I told him I felt something when he held my hand, like as if something just stitched us together. Like something around us stitching us, in order to bind us together or something. He shared he felt something too. I thought (yeah your a guy, no telling lol). Eventually, Glen asked me to marry him.
The Big Day!
As a result,we were married on July 31, 2017 surrounded by God and our children. God works in ways we never thought imagined, but He is always working everything out for our good!
