WARNING: Long post ahead
It was recently suggested that people here should share their stories of how they came to realize the real joy of God's plan for Human marriages, and how discovering God's blessing upon polygynous households became a blessing to us. In my case, the short answer is "without acknowledging God's blessing upon polygyny, I could not have found the man whom God appointed for my life, since he was already married when I found him." The long answer is... well, the long answer is the reason for the warning at the top.
My story (aside from being long) is, to say the least, unorthodox. I was the daughter of 2 first generation immigrants from different parts of the world. My father, Anton Grigorovich, fled the Soviet Republic of Ukraine by claiming asylum to escape one of the many Stalinic purges Ukraine endured. He was a devoted Communist in his youth, and the son of a war hero. His father (Grigor, as you guessed from his name if you're familiar with Russic naming conventions) had been drafted in '42 to be used as a meat shield for drunk Russian officers to hide behind during World War 2, but killing 73 Nazis and saving his commanding officer's life twice did not save him from the regime's wrath later on in '61 when he dared to speak out about his family's experiences as a child during the 1932-33 Holodomor. When Grandfather Grigor and his wife were both "invited to chat" by the authorities and never heard from again, my father (a young up-and-coming Party Member at the time) knew it was time to sneak to the West. He never told me much about how, but he did say the US promised him aid in his defection and then abandoned that promise "when it became inconvenient." He ended up having to make his own way all the way to West Germany to claim asylum there, before eventually making a deal with the US (a green card and a path to citizenship in exchange for everything he knew) and settling in New York. There he learned of Christ, abandoned his Communist ideology, and was baptized.
My mother, Tsering, was Tibetan. She was a small child when she and her mother fled Tibet to escape Mao's takeover. Her father had been a soldier in what Tibet generously called an army. He, like the rest of Tibet's troops, had begun the fight against the Chinese occupation force too late (nobody realized their intent until they were already in the country. They had been promised military aid by the US, a promise which the US promptly forgot "when it became inconvenient." Sound familiar? Eventually my mother and her mother made the treacherous trek into India (crossing the Himalayas under cover of night because PLA fighter-bombers sought civilian escapees during the day), where she claimed asylum and eventually attained permission from US authorities to move to New York. There she learned of Christ, abandoned her Buddhist upbringing, and was baptized. Eventually, Anton and Tsering were married and became officers in the Salvation Army.
For those who aren't familiar with the S.A, they take that "Army" part quite literally. A church is "a corps," baptized members of the congregation are "soldiers" (complete with uniforms), pastors are "officers" with ranks, deacons are "NCO's," and so on.
In '71, I was born; the 3rd of what would be 4 children. Though I was born on US soil to parents who had been naturalized as US citizens, my childhood was not spent in America. I was barely a year old when my parents moved us all to Sumatra, Indonesia where they had been assigned as missionaries. I grew up in a village where my brothers and I were a novelty (they had rarely seen a foreigner, more rarely any foreign children and NEVER a foreign baby), and probably learned Bahassa Indonese and Bahassa Malay sooner than I learned English, since my parents were the only ones around me who spoke any of the last. I was blessed enough to grow up absolutely immersed in God's constant presence, seeing Him at work every day, and my father was the founder of three churches there. Still, both my parents felt their larger call was to reach souls in what was arguably the most impregnable bastion of Atheism on Earth: the USSR. In 1983, an opportunity arose. Suffice it to say, I'll bet you didn't know the Salvation Army had what might sometimes be somewhat cheekily called "Covert Ops." Missionaries who do not admit they are there as missionaries, whose connections to the Sal-Arm are hidden under mountains of paperwork and of course, no uniforms or acknowledged ranks.
Being a missionary was not legal in the USSR. Not technically, anyway. I never understood the legal loopholes my parents jumped through to get us into the country. It had something to do with something called a "cultural exchange visa" that became available in the early 1980's. All I know is we celebrated New Year's Day of '84 in the "thriving metropolis" of Nukus, Karalpakstan, Uzbekistan; spitting distance away from Kazakhstan, an hour's drive from Russia-proper, and nearly 3,500 miles behind the Iron Curtain. I was old enough now to pick up on how different the Soviet atmosphere was from the relaxing and (mostly) friendly culture of Sumatra. Every move, every word had to be watched, because the walls had ears and those ears had eyes. There were constant town meetings. These meetings were billed as friendly gatherings but there was no hiding their true intent. They were opportunities for the locals to denounce each other in the sight of the Communist authorities, and no offense was too slight to make someone worthy of denunciation. And as our very presence there was an act of proselytization, it would never have taken more than one person pointing a finger at us one time, and we'd be on the next plane back to the US in handcuffs as deportees.
...if we were lucky.
Nonetheless, I look back on those days fondly. Why? Because I was able to witness God at work. There are fewer things more moving than watching a regional KGB boss who walked into an underground church intending to arrest or shoot everyone inside, suddenly tear the hammer and sickle off of his lapel, throw his Party Card on the altar and beg to be baptized. Every day I saw, first-hand, "God is real, God is unconquerable, and my mom and dad are here on God's orders, on God's business. They can kill us if they want, but it doesn't matter. We're on the winning side."
Then came the first "let's change everything you've ever known" year: 1989. The Communist world started coming apart at the seams. My mother watched the news of the Tiananmen protests in Beijing and rejoiced, then wept for days at the CCP's bloodthirsty crackdown. The Berlin wall fell. The USSR was collapsing and everyone knew it. But for me, what mattered more than that was that I turned 18. I was a legal adult, which meant I could no longer ride in on my parents' visas as a dependent. My application for a visa of my own was summarily shot down by authorities in Moscow with barely even a cursory review. In the end, I had no choice. I had to return to America, a "homeland" I had no memory of. My mother's sister lived in Dallas, and I went to live with her.
I've got to say, seeing America for the first time was... overwhelming. And not at all in any kind of good way. I had spent my childhood in a place where we kids would walk out of the house and walk unsupervised down the road to the playground any time of day and come back after dark. As long as our parents knew where we were and we were home in time for bed, nobody had a worry in the world. We were safe. But here in America, one couldn't let a child walk to the end of the driveway unsupervised for fear some lunatic would abduct them and do who-knows-what. In Sumatra, and even in Nukus, the notion of someone being murdered (state murder's notwithstanding in the latter case) was virtually unheard of. A single homicide would have devastated a community for months. Here in America though? Drive-by shootings were so regular you could set your watch by them. But that wasn't even the worst of it.
The worst part of life in America, were the "churches"...
...if one could call them that.
The first time I walked into a little church in McKinney, Texas, I had the peculiar (and impossible) feeling that I'd been there before. It took several weeks before I realized why. The atmosphere in that church (and every other church I would set foot in on US soil for the next 13 years) was absolutely identical to the Party-led town meetings I'd had to sit through in Soviet Uzbekistan. Everybody there, from the "holier-than-thou's" sitting on the front row to the whisperers on the back, was looking around, waiting for some opportunity to denounce someone in the Church as a "sinner," just to take attention off of their own dirty laundry.
Well, it took me a grand total of 182 days to decide I'd had more than enough of the so-called "Land of Opportunity." I started studying Hebrew so I'd be ready for the following Autumn, and applied for university admission in Tel Aviv as a Law major. The only time I came back to the US was in 1994, to say good-bye to my dying father. In his final hours, I sat with him by his hospital bed watching news of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, wherein his homeland, Ukraine, handed over nearly three thousand nuclear warheads to Russia (under US duress) in return for what he and my mother both knew the worthlessness of: US promises of protection. The last words I heard from his mouth, as he watched the screen in horror and agony, were "Batʹkivshchyna... Ukraina... Boh virnyy, ale Ameryka vas zradyt.ʹ" Fatherland... Ukraine... God is faithful, but America will betray you.
Which they are doing now, because that promise became inconvenient.
I returned to my studies in Israel with a piece of my very soul missing. I had always been a daddy's girl, and I'd not only watched him die but watched him die weeping, predicting the imminent betrayal of his homeland by his adopted land. I no longer knew what I wanted out of my life, but I knew I had no desire for any part of it to be spent with the name "America" hanging around my neck like an albatross.
I made up my mind that I would renounce my US citizenship. I filed all the papers to do so, got the IRS's approval (yes, the IRS has to confirm you don't owe any money before you're allowed to throw your passport in a consular officer's face and forsake America), and made my appointment with a consular officer at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. I stood there, recited the declaration of renunciation, ending with the words "do hereby renounce my status as a citizen of the United States of America."
And the consular officer looked back at me, blank-faced, and casually said, "no you don't," before picking up his pen and going back to his work.
"Excuse me?"
To make a long story short, I didn't know that when a US citizen renounces their citizenship, the US consular officer hearing their renunciation claims the right to simply deny it, leaving the citizen stuck with the citizenship they came to renounce. And for the record, the US is one of only three countries on the planet arrogant enough to claim this right. The other two are China and North Korea. I tried again 90 days later and go the same response. Ninety more days, same response. After the third, I screamed at the consular officer, "who do I have to kill to have my citizenship stripped from me as a punishment?!"
The consular officer's bored response, without even bothering to look up from whatever he was scribbling on, was "Well, I'm not going to tell you that because we're already short-staffed enough. Next appointment, please."
So, the story is getting lengthy and I'm going to speed it up. I graduated, then went to grad school in Manheim, Germany, where I finished a Masters in jurisprudence. By that time I was in my mid-20's and frankly, I was miserable. I was lonely. I was an outsider everywhere I went, chained by that inescapable US passport to a homeland I barely knew and wanted nothing to do with. I began to ask what Jehovah's purpose for my life was. I'm ashamed to admit it but I had even gotten to the point where I wondered if He even had one. I began to realize, around this time, that I knew exactly where He was calling me. It was a Godless, cut-throat land that I viewed the same way Jonah viewed Nineveh. The notion of going there terrified me.
As you can probably guess, I'm talking about the United States of America.
On February 22, 1997, I touched down at LaGuardia. Getting work was a nightmare (it's ridiculous how American law firms think a degree from anywhere beyond their borders is less valid, despite the fact that America's universities have some of the lowest standards in the world), and America was as cold and frightening a place as it had been when I came here at 18. I did humiliating office jobs where my primary role was to give recent law school grads (most of whom couldn't have passed my sophomore year undergrad exams) something in a silk blouse to oggle at while I made their coffee, and enrolled in a doctoral program at NYU (Constitutional Law) before eventually accepting an internship at the Czech Consulate.
I had another problem. I was still lonely.
I had grown up beyond the reach of Western feminism, so I knew it was never God's plan for a woman to try and make it on her own. I knew God wanted me to be a man's helpmeet, and I wanted that. I had no desire to be a spinster. But the men around me were such, absolutely, typical, Americans: badly educated, poorly-read, ill-mannered, un-traveled, uncultured, uncouth, narrow-minded, arrogant, jingoistic, self-righteous, pompous hobgoblins, convinced that they had some kind of "Noble Mandate" to lead the rest of the world to the "greatness" they deluded themselves into thinking they were blessed with. I rarely found a man that year who I felt was worth going on a date with and never one who was worth a second date.
Within a year I was at the point where I had to remind myself every day "I will NOT medicate myself for depression; I don't need pills when I have Christ. I will be joyous... I will be joyous... I WILL be joyous... even if I'm stuck in America." My questions of "what am I doing here? What is my purpose? Why did you bring me here, Lord?" grew more helpless and desperate every day, and all I heard from the Lord was "Be still. I have a plan."
Well, then came the second time in my life when everything I knew was thrown for a loop. The day he walked in.
In my intro I've already gushed over my first meeting with the man who eventually became my Husband, my Pastor, and in keeping with the example of Sarah as we're reminded in 1 Peter 3:6, my Master. Marine vet, evangelist, handsome enough that even with the eyepatch he wore (he hadn't yet given in and gotten the glass eye that makes him a little more approachable in the Pulpit) he still belonged on the cover of a Nora Roberts novel... if they ever make a movie about my life, the moment when he walked into the room and walked right up to me as we were introduced, the soundtrack needs to be Belinda Carlisle's "I Get Weak," because if my knees had gotten any weaker when I met him I'd have ended up falling on them and would have found my face in a somewhat awkward position to explain in public. When he asked me to dinner I honestly don't remember how many languages my addled and melting brain cycled through before it finally figured out, "come on girl, the English pronunciation is 'yes'."
Then, at the first date, came the problem. At least, what I thought was a problem.
At first everything was wonderful. He was as charming as he had seemed, with an absolutely incredible sense of humor and an endless vault of stories to tell. His background was like the opposite of mine. I was the born-here-raised-abroad child of immigrants, he was in every way quintessentially American. As in, Hollywood-grade, idealized American. His mother was Navajo, and his father was a direct descendant of one of the Massachusetts Bay Colonists. He was an evangelist, as I said, and when he wasn't on the road spreading Christ's word he worked as a tae-kown-do instructor. He quoted Marcus Aurelius's work often enough to come within a hair's breadth of being annoying, but refused to quote him in English, insisting that one only got the real value of Aurelius by reading (or quoting) him in Latin. At one point I found myself leaning dreamily across the table and murmuring aloud, in Malay, "I can't believe someone like this is real."
"I am. Trust me," he answered...
...In perfect, unaccented Malay!
Turns out he'd spent his time in the Marine Corps as an intelligence officer, where he'd gotten extensive linguistic training. "When I joined the Corps I only spoke four languages," he told me. "By the time I was discharged I spoke ten. Eleven if gunfire counts as a language."
I wrinkled my nose. "Why would gunfire count as a language?"
"Oh, I've found it can be quite expressive when other languages have failed to resolve a conflict," he answered dryly.
So, he's a deeply God-fearing, preaching, intellectual who just so happens to also be one of the world's deadliest warriors, I mused... Insert a few more minutes here of me being a giddy, fawning, lovestruck little hot mess.
By the end of one conversation, absolutely every neuron in my brain was absolutely screaming "this is your answer. This is why God brought you back to America, why He put you on Earth to begin with. You were put on this Earth to follow, to serve, and to support THIS man's vision."
"How... how is it that you aren't married?" I asked.
Well, then came the kicker.
He was.
My brain went through a few "does not compute" cycles. He's an evangelist. He's married. He's on a date with me... I don't get it. What did I miss? Interspersed with alternating interjections of he's a dream, and girl, you're sinning like crazy by even being here. I don't think it was hard for him to pick up on the mental loop-de-loops I was doing trying to make sense of it. By the end of the dinner he offered me a deal. Our next few meetings wouldn't be dates, but Bible studies, and he'd show me proof that it was no sin for a man to have multiple wives. If I agreed, I could walk away. If he convinced me, then we'd keep dating and he didn't make any secret that his goal would be to quickly see if marriage was in the cards or not.
On June 4th, 2000, I became that man's second wife, while his first wife (a fiery little 5'2 half-Filipina pocket-pistol whose mother was a Luzon rice-farmer's daughter and whose father was a fighter pilot from Iowa) stood by and beamed with pride as my Matron of Honor. In 2004 he moved both of his wives to southeast Texas, where we have lived ever since. In that time I have seen him found four churches, one of which he pastors. I've borne him five children (two twin boys and three girls), and watched God do miracles through him. ..I'll confess, I've never learned to call America "home," and I doubt I ever will. But watching God work through him is such a privilege that it makes life in America bearable. He's as fierce as Gideon, as wise as Solomon, and views the world with the same "I'm here on God's business; what can you do except kill me?" attitude that characterized both my parents, especially my father. Nothing I have done in my life, from my twin doctorates to my diplomatic career, makes me as proud as he fact that I can look at that man and say "I belong to him, and I've been a vital helpmeet in his work and ministry." At his side, I finally understand why God put me here in America.
And if I had doggedly insisted on the mandatory monogamy dogma that all of Christendom has been fed for eighteen-and-a-half centuries, I would never have experienced it.
It was recently suggested that people here should share their stories of how they came to realize the real joy of God's plan for Human marriages, and how discovering God's blessing upon polygynous households became a blessing to us. In my case, the short answer is "without acknowledging God's blessing upon polygyny, I could not have found the man whom God appointed for my life, since he was already married when I found him." The long answer is... well, the long answer is the reason for the warning at the top.
My story (aside from being long) is, to say the least, unorthodox. I was the daughter of 2 first generation immigrants from different parts of the world. My father, Anton Grigorovich, fled the Soviet Republic of Ukraine by claiming asylum to escape one of the many Stalinic purges Ukraine endured. He was a devoted Communist in his youth, and the son of a war hero. His father (Grigor, as you guessed from his name if you're familiar with Russic naming conventions) had been drafted in '42 to be used as a meat shield for drunk Russian officers to hide behind during World War 2, but killing 73 Nazis and saving his commanding officer's life twice did not save him from the regime's wrath later on in '61 when he dared to speak out about his family's experiences as a child during the 1932-33 Holodomor. When Grandfather Grigor and his wife were both "invited to chat" by the authorities and never heard from again, my father (a young up-and-coming Party Member at the time) knew it was time to sneak to the West. He never told me much about how, but he did say the US promised him aid in his defection and then abandoned that promise "when it became inconvenient." He ended up having to make his own way all the way to West Germany to claim asylum there, before eventually making a deal with the US (a green card and a path to citizenship in exchange for everything he knew) and settling in New York. There he learned of Christ, abandoned his Communist ideology, and was baptized.
My mother, Tsering, was Tibetan. She was a small child when she and her mother fled Tibet to escape Mao's takeover. Her father had been a soldier in what Tibet generously called an army. He, like the rest of Tibet's troops, had begun the fight against the Chinese occupation force too late (nobody realized their intent until they were already in the country. They had been promised military aid by the US, a promise which the US promptly forgot "when it became inconvenient." Sound familiar? Eventually my mother and her mother made the treacherous trek into India (crossing the Himalayas under cover of night because PLA fighter-bombers sought civilian escapees during the day), where she claimed asylum and eventually attained permission from US authorities to move to New York. There she learned of Christ, abandoned her Buddhist upbringing, and was baptized. Eventually, Anton and Tsering were married and became officers in the Salvation Army.
For those who aren't familiar with the S.A, they take that "Army" part quite literally. A church is "a corps," baptized members of the congregation are "soldiers" (complete with uniforms), pastors are "officers" with ranks, deacons are "NCO's," and so on.
In '71, I was born; the 3rd of what would be 4 children. Though I was born on US soil to parents who had been naturalized as US citizens, my childhood was not spent in America. I was barely a year old when my parents moved us all to Sumatra, Indonesia where they had been assigned as missionaries. I grew up in a village where my brothers and I were a novelty (they had rarely seen a foreigner, more rarely any foreign children and NEVER a foreign baby), and probably learned Bahassa Indonese and Bahassa Malay sooner than I learned English, since my parents were the only ones around me who spoke any of the last. I was blessed enough to grow up absolutely immersed in God's constant presence, seeing Him at work every day, and my father was the founder of three churches there. Still, both my parents felt their larger call was to reach souls in what was arguably the most impregnable bastion of Atheism on Earth: the USSR. In 1983, an opportunity arose. Suffice it to say, I'll bet you didn't know the Salvation Army had what might sometimes be somewhat cheekily called "Covert Ops." Missionaries who do not admit they are there as missionaries, whose connections to the Sal-Arm are hidden under mountains of paperwork and of course, no uniforms or acknowledged ranks.
Being a missionary was not legal in the USSR. Not technically, anyway. I never understood the legal loopholes my parents jumped through to get us into the country. It had something to do with something called a "cultural exchange visa" that became available in the early 1980's. All I know is we celebrated New Year's Day of '84 in the "thriving metropolis" of Nukus, Karalpakstan, Uzbekistan; spitting distance away from Kazakhstan, an hour's drive from Russia-proper, and nearly 3,500 miles behind the Iron Curtain. I was old enough now to pick up on how different the Soviet atmosphere was from the relaxing and (mostly) friendly culture of Sumatra. Every move, every word had to be watched, because the walls had ears and those ears had eyes. There were constant town meetings. These meetings were billed as friendly gatherings but there was no hiding their true intent. They were opportunities for the locals to denounce each other in the sight of the Communist authorities, and no offense was too slight to make someone worthy of denunciation. And as our very presence there was an act of proselytization, it would never have taken more than one person pointing a finger at us one time, and we'd be on the next plane back to the US in handcuffs as deportees.
...if we were lucky.
Nonetheless, I look back on those days fondly. Why? Because I was able to witness God at work. There are fewer things more moving than watching a regional KGB boss who walked into an underground church intending to arrest or shoot everyone inside, suddenly tear the hammer and sickle off of his lapel, throw his Party Card on the altar and beg to be baptized. Every day I saw, first-hand, "God is real, God is unconquerable, and my mom and dad are here on God's orders, on God's business. They can kill us if they want, but it doesn't matter. We're on the winning side."
Then came the first "let's change everything you've ever known" year: 1989. The Communist world started coming apart at the seams. My mother watched the news of the Tiananmen protests in Beijing and rejoiced, then wept for days at the CCP's bloodthirsty crackdown. The Berlin wall fell. The USSR was collapsing and everyone knew it. But for me, what mattered more than that was that I turned 18. I was a legal adult, which meant I could no longer ride in on my parents' visas as a dependent. My application for a visa of my own was summarily shot down by authorities in Moscow with barely even a cursory review. In the end, I had no choice. I had to return to America, a "homeland" I had no memory of. My mother's sister lived in Dallas, and I went to live with her.
I've got to say, seeing America for the first time was... overwhelming. And not at all in any kind of good way. I had spent my childhood in a place where we kids would walk out of the house and walk unsupervised down the road to the playground any time of day and come back after dark. As long as our parents knew where we were and we were home in time for bed, nobody had a worry in the world. We were safe. But here in America, one couldn't let a child walk to the end of the driveway unsupervised for fear some lunatic would abduct them and do who-knows-what. In Sumatra, and even in Nukus, the notion of someone being murdered (state murder's notwithstanding in the latter case) was virtually unheard of. A single homicide would have devastated a community for months. Here in America though? Drive-by shootings were so regular you could set your watch by them. But that wasn't even the worst of it.
The worst part of life in America, were the "churches"...
...if one could call them that.
The first time I walked into a little church in McKinney, Texas, I had the peculiar (and impossible) feeling that I'd been there before. It took several weeks before I realized why. The atmosphere in that church (and every other church I would set foot in on US soil for the next 13 years) was absolutely identical to the Party-led town meetings I'd had to sit through in Soviet Uzbekistan. Everybody there, from the "holier-than-thou's" sitting on the front row to the whisperers on the back, was looking around, waiting for some opportunity to denounce someone in the Church as a "sinner," just to take attention off of their own dirty laundry.
Well, it took me a grand total of 182 days to decide I'd had more than enough of the so-called "Land of Opportunity." I started studying Hebrew so I'd be ready for the following Autumn, and applied for university admission in Tel Aviv as a Law major. The only time I came back to the US was in 1994, to say good-bye to my dying father. In his final hours, I sat with him by his hospital bed watching news of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, wherein his homeland, Ukraine, handed over nearly three thousand nuclear warheads to Russia (under US duress) in return for what he and my mother both knew the worthlessness of: US promises of protection. The last words I heard from his mouth, as he watched the screen in horror and agony, were "Batʹkivshchyna... Ukraina... Boh virnyy, ale Ameryka vas zradyt.ʹ" Fatherland... Ukraine... God is faithful, but America will betray you.
Which they are doing now, because that promise became inconvenient.
I returned to my studies in Israel with a piece of my very soul missing. I had always been a daddy's girl, and I'd not only watched him die but watched him die weeping, predicting the imminent betrayal of his homeland by his adopted land. I no longer knew what I wanted out of my life, but I knew I had no desire for any part of it to be spent with the name "America" hanging around my neck like an albatross.
I made up my mind that I would renounce my US citizenship. I filed all the papers to do so, got the IRS's approval (yes, the IRS has to confirm you don't owe any money before you're allowed to throw your passport in a consular officer's face and forsake America), and made my appointment with a consular officer at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. I stood there, recited the declaration of renunciation, ending with the words "do hereby renounce my status as a citizen of the United States of America."
And the consular officer looked back at me, blank-faced, and casually said, "no you don't," before picking up his pen and going back to his work.
"Excuse me?"
To make a long story short, I didn't know that when a US citizen renounces their citizenship, the US consular officer hearing their renunciation claims the right to simply deny it, leaving the citizen stuck with the citizenship they came to renounce. And for the record, the US is one of only three countries on the planet arrogant enough to claim this right. The other two are China and North Korea. I tried again 90 days later and go the same response. Ninety more days, same response. After the third, I screamed at the consular officer, "who do I have to kill to have my citizenship stripped from me as a punishment?!"
The consular officer's bored response, without even bothering to look up from whatever he was scribbling on, was "Well, I'm not going to tell you that because we're already short-staffed enough. Next appointment, please."
So, the story is getting lengthy and I'm going to speed it up. I graduated, then went to grad school in Manheim, Germany, where I finished a Masters in jurisprudence. By that time I was in my mid-20's and frankly, I was miserable. I was lonely. I was an outsider everywhere I went, chained by that inescapable US passport to a homeland I barely knew and wanted nothing to do with. I began to ask what Jehovah's purpose for my life was. I'm ashamed to admit it but I had even gotten to the point where I wondered if He even had one. I began to realize, around this time, that I knew exactly where He was calling me. It was a Godless, cut-throat land that I viewed the same way Jonah viewed Nineveh. The notion of going there terrified me.
As you can probably guess, I'm talking about the United States of America.
On February 22, 1997, I touched down at LaGuardia. Getting work was a nightmare (it's ridiculous how American law firms think a degree from anywhere beyond their borders is less valid, despite the fact that America's universities have some of the lowest standards in the world), and America was as cold and frightening a place as it had been when I came here at 18. I did humiliating office jobs where my primary role was to give recent law school grads (most of whom couldn't have passed my sophomore year undergrad exams) something in a silk blouse to oggle at while I made their coffee, and enrolled in a doctoral program at NYU (Constitutional Law) before eventually accepting an internship at the Czech Consulate.
I had another problem. I was still lonely.
I had grown up beyond the reach of Western feminism, so I knew it was never God's plan for a woman to try and make it on her own. I knew God wanted me to be a man's helpmeet, and I wanted that. I had no desire to be a spinster. But the men around me were such, absolutely, typical, Americans: badly educated, poorly-read, ill-mannered, un-traveled, uncultured, uncouth, narrow-minded, arrogant, jingoistic, self-righteous, pompous hobgoblins, convinced that they had some kind of "Noble Mandate" to lead the rest of the world to the "greatness" they deluded themselves into thinking they were blessed with. I rarely found a man that year who I felt was worth going on a date with and never one who was worth a second date.
Within a year I was at the point where I had to remind myself every day "I will NOT medicate myself for depression; I don't need pills when I have Christ. I will be joyous... I will be joyous... I WILL be joyous... even if I'm stuck in America." My questions of "what am I doing here? What is my purpose? Why did you bring me here, Lord?" grew more helpless and desperate every day, and all I heard from the Lord was "Be still. I have a plan."
Well, then came the second time in my life when everything I knew was thrown for a loop. The day he walked in.
In my intro I've already gushed over my first meeting with the man who eventually became my Husband, my Pastor, and in keeping with the example of Sarah as we're reminded in 1 Peter 3:6, my Master. Marine vet, evangelist, handsome enough that even with the eyepatch he wore (he hadn't yet given in and gotten the glass eye that makes him a little more approachable in the Pulpit) he still belonged on the cover of a Nora Roberts novel... if they ever make a movie about my life, the moment when he walked into the room and walked right up to me as we were introduced, the soundtrack needs to be Belinda Carlisle's "I Get Weak," because if my knees had gotten any weaker when I met him I'd have ended up falling on them and would have found my face in a somewhat awkward position to explain in public. When he asked me to dinner I honestly don't remember how many languages my addled and melting brain cycled through before it finally figured out, "come on girl, the English pronunciation is 'yes'."
Then, at the first date, came the problem. At least, what I thought was a problem.
At first everything was wonderful. He was as charming as he had seemed, with an absolutely incredible sense of humor and an endless vault of stories to tell. His background was like the opposite of mine. I was the born-here-raised-abroad child of immigrants, he was in every way quintessentially American. As in, Hollywood-grade, idealized American. His mother was Navajo, and his father was a direct descendant of one of the Massachusetts Bay Colonists. He was an evangelist, as I said, and when he wasn't on the road spreading Christ's word he worked as a tae-kown-do instructor. He quoted Marcus Aurelius's work often enough to come within a hair's breadth of being annoying, but refused to quote him in English, insisting that one only got the real value of Aurelius by reading (or quoting) him in Latin. At one point I found myself leaning dreamily across the table and murmuring aloud, in Malay, "I can't believe someone like this is real."
"I am. Trust me," he answered...
...In perfect, unaccented Malay!
Turns out he'd spent his time in the Marine Corps as an intelligence officer, where he'd gotten extensive linguistic training. "When I joined the Corps I only spoke four languages," he told me. "By the time I was discharged I spoke ten. Eleven if gunfire counts as a language."
I wrinkled my nose. "Why would gunfire count as a language?"
"Oh, I've found it can be quite expressive when other languages have failed to resolve a conflict," he answered dryly.
So, he's a deeply God-fearing, preaching, intellectual who just so happens to also be one of the world's deadliest warriors, I mused... Insert a few more minutes here of me being a giddy, fawning, lovestruck little hot mess.
By the end of one conversation, absolutely every neuron in my brain was absolutely screaming "this is your answer. This is why God brought you back to America, why He put you on Earth to begin with. You were put on this Earth to follow, to serve, and to support THIS man's vision."
"How... how is it that you aren't married?" I asked.
Well, then came the kicker.
He was.
My brain went through a few "does not compute" cycles. He's an evangelist. He's married. He's on a date with me... I don't get it. What did I miss? Interspersed with alternating interjections of he's a dream, and girl, you're sinning like crazy by even being here. I don't think it was hard for him to pick up on the mental loop-de-loops I was doing trying to make sense of it. By the end of the dinner he offered me a deal. Our next few meetings wouldn't be dates, but Bible studies, and he'd show me proof that it was no sin for a man to have multiple wives. If I agreed, I could walk away. If he convinced me, then we'd keep dating and he didn't make any secret that his goal would be to quickly see if marriage was in the cards or not.
On June 4th, 2000, I became that man's second wife, while his first wife (a fiery little 5'2 half-Filipina pocket-pistol whose mother was a Luzon rice-farmer's daughter and whose father was a fighter pilot from Iowa) stood by and beamed with pride as my Matron of Honor. In 2004 he moved both of his wives to southeast Texas, where we have lived ever since. In that time I have seen him found four churches, one of which he pastors. I've borne him five children (two twin boys and three girls), and watched God do miracles through him. ..I'll confess, I've never learned to call America "home," and I doubt I ever will. But watching God work through him is such a privilege that it makes life in America bearable. He's as fierce as Gideon, as wise as Solomon, and views the world with the same "I'm here on God's business; what can you do except kill me?" attitude that characterized both my parents, especially my father. Nothing I have done in my life, from my twin doctorates to my diplomatic career, makes me as proud as he fact that I can look at that man and say "I belong to him, and I've been a vital helpmeet in his work and ministry." At his side, I finally understand why God put me here in America.
And if I had doggedly insisted on the mandatory monogamy dogma that all of Christendom has been fed for eighteen-and-a-half centuries, I would never have experienced it.
