Our Dating and Engagement Story

As a teenager and a new Christian, Anne Barron realized her relationship with her boyfriend. There was something that was off there.

Instead of already getting somebody that is on fire. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. We'll hear today about how God was guiding and directing Anne Barron and Dave Wilson's lives while they were still teenagers.

How he brought them together. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to 2021. Here we are. This is going to be a good year. Please put 2020 behind us. And we've had people who have been regularly coming up to me, coming up to you guys and saying, so the weekend to remember, are we doing those again?

The answer is yes. The answer is, does anybody really know what anybody's doing this year? But yeah, we have plans this spring for about a dozen weekend to remember getaways. And they're going to be in cities across the country in socially distanced settings and ballrooms, which means that you may be in a ballroom that can hold a thousand people.

And there may be a couple hundred of you in the ballroom, which also means these dozen events are probably going to sell out. Quickly. Yeah. Like right away. So if this is something that you go, this is a priority for us in the spring of 2021. Don't wait till the night or tomorrow.

Do it right now. And I would say too, like we've been locked down and I think some of us are itching to get out and our marriages need this help. Oh, yeah. And we're going to talk more this spring about marriage maintenance, but the weekend to remember, you've shared with us before, part of your story from before you were married, three weeks before you were married, you end up at a weekend to remember.

Two weeks to the day. This was something that somebody who was discipling you had said you should do this? Yeah, I was a senior in college and was a freshman. And I'm not recommending, by the way, that seniors marry freshmen, but that's where we were. And yeah, I was involved in crew ministry on our campus. We both were.

Athletes in Action, she at Kentucky, me at the illustrious Harvard of the Midwest, Ball State University. We didn't even know what we're going to. They just said, if you're going to get married, it was like mandatory. You have to go to the weekend to remember. Which was great advice.

Yeah, it was great advice. They said they teach God's game plan for marriage. And we had no idea. If someone would have asked us, hey, why do you think God created marriage? We would have looked at each other dumbfounded and thought, uh, to make us happy.

Have no idea. So we can have legitimate sex. Exactly. And I think a lot of us have this shallow, superficial understanding of marriage.

So you get in the car, you drive to Chicago for the weekend to remember? Yes. Well, you know a lot about us, Bob. He's heard it all. I've heard the story.

Yeah, it was 41 years ago. We didn't even stay in the hotel. We just stayed at my sister's house. And she even looked at us like, what are you guys doing up here? You're going to a pre-married thing? It's like, well, there's married couples there. I mean, there were a thousand people in that ballroom.

It was a big one and probably 30, 40 or 50 of us were engaged or pre-married. But here's what we thought, Bob, we don't really need this. You know, this is nice to hear, but we're going to be amazing. We're going to have a great marriage. Yeah, we thought we love each other.

We love Jesus. We're going into ministry. Marriage really for us won't be very hard. And I think part of that was because of the way we started dating and the way we met. We just thought this will be a supernatural marriage and no one else will have as good of a marriage as we will. When Mary Ann and I got engaged, I think we had the thought that we are two people who love Jesus. Therefore, marriage is going to work.

Yes. Marriage is hard for people who don't love Jesus. Marriage is easy for people who do love Jesus. Well, it takes about five minutes of marriage before you go, okay, that wasn't exactly right.

And yet we do have that kind of naivete and then we get the wake-up call of, oh, this is harder than we realized. Exactly. We never saw, I never saw a single blemish in the long dating relationship we had, six months. Yes, right.

And nine months total. We had never spent more than five days together total. In the same town. Yes, because we were in different colleges. We started dating in the summer. Dave went off to college pretty early because of football, so we didn't know each other very well. And we both were coming from this point of being fairly new in our walks with God. And I can remember when I first saw Dave and someone told me he became a Christian. You know, there was flowing locks of hair, slow motion.

I was walking through our gym, high school gym at Christmas, getting ready to have Christmas break. So I was going to my car and all the girls were fluttering about and they said, Dave Wilson's in the gym playing basketball. Because everybody knew Dave Wilson.

He was a junior in college and they were all scattered and not knowing what to do because they were so excited to see Dave Wilson. I've never heard this part before. I didn't ever tell you this because it would make your head big.

Whatever. And so I walked through the gym kind of ignoring him and someone came up to me and they said, did you hear that he became a Christian? And I was very new in my faith, but I was really excited about my faith. And so I walked straight over to Dave and my brothers were friends with him and I went up to him and said, you?

So you became a Christian and gave your life to Jesus? She's being nice. Do you remember this conversation? She didn't say you. She goes, yeah, like you're a Christian. That's what she said. I wasn't that bad.

She just looked right and she doesn't say hi or anything. Like you're a Christian? Yeah, right. That's what she said.

And I go, uh, yeah, I actually just became a Christian. That can't be true. Now you're exaggerating. I wasn't that bad. Maybe I was exaggerating a little bit. But he had a really bad reputation with alcohol, with girls.

And so I had a hard time believing that. But that night I was sitting in our high school gym watching a basketball game. Her boyfriend was playing. And I happened to be sitting beside a guy that Dave knew who was a classmate and I was sharing the gospel like, oh, I thought I was a Christian, but I'd never given my life to Jesus. And this is how he's changed my life. And Dave was sitting right in front of me and I patted him on the shoulder and said, Dave, tell him what's happened to you.

Yeah. So all night during this ball game, she was sharing the gospel right behind me and inviting me into this conversation. This was one of my best friend's younger brother. And she was sharing with Scott and I would turn around and basically share my testimony and add some things. All I know is I remember getting in the car that night and driving home and thinking, I've never met a young woman on fire for Jesus like that. You know, it was like, wow. And I was in a long term relationship with a girl that I figured in about a year, year and a half, we would get married. We'd been dating since my junior year in high school.

Now I'm a junior in college. And so it struck me that night, you know, like, wow, Anne Barron is, she's going for it. She's on fire. And I thought the same thing about Dave. I thought, oh, this is for real. Like this guy is serious about his faith. And I also thought, I wish my boyfriend was like that. And then I thought, what would it be like to be married to or date someone who was really passionate about their walk with God? And then we kind of forgot about that. That was what was attractive about him to you.

Yes, exactly. And that was beginning to be attractive for you about Anne or someone like Anne. You just were attracted to someone who had that kind of passion. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't as much Anne as much as that woman on fire.

I don't think I've ever seen anything like that. And, you know, because of that, and it was Christmas break for me. I go back to college and my girlfriend was at a different university. So the next weekend I'm driving to go see her, which I did almost every weekend. And it hit me.

Wow. When we're together, Jesus is not even in the equation. You know, I'm trying to walk with God at my campus. When I get with her, I go right back into where I know Jesus doesn't want me to live. I spend the night at her place. We're sexually active. And I'm trying to grow on my walk and I'm not living. And I'm not blaming her, but she's pulling me a different way. And I'd seen what it could be like.

Again, just one evening watching Anne share Christ. But that marked me. I remember I'd never forgotten that. Me too. Because I realized when I was with this boyfriend, I thought I'm always pushing him.

Like, oh, you should read this or, oh, we should pray about this. But I always felt like I'm pulling him along. And we, over the years, have seen so many couples do that. So many dating couples.

Well, I think that he'll start growing. Or I think he'll become this guy instead of already getting somebody that is on fire for Jesus. And I had even actually started that in my mind after seeing Anne. And knowing I'm never going to date her, thinking, well, after I get married, I'll get my girlfriend where I am spiritually. And, you know, now after 40 years of marriage, how many times have we heard married couples say, that's what I thought too, and it doesn't always go that way. I've quoted this for years, but I heard Tommy Nelson on Family Life Today, pastor from Denton, Texas. He said, I always say to single people, if you are single, your job is to run as hard and as fast toward Jesus as you can. He said, if while you're running, in the corner of your eye, you see somebody running in the same direction at the same speed, take a second look. That's your dating philosophy. That's how you do this. And that struck me because a lot of people will say, look for another Christian.

Yeah. And there's a difference between looking for a Christian and somebody who's running at your speed and your direction. Because if you're on fire for Jesus and somebody else is lukewarm for Jesus, now we have the- You mean the guy laying on the track?

Sitting on the bench watching? Now we've got the unequally yoked situation where you're pulling hard and they don't, they're just dragging their heels and you're just spinning in circles. And they're saying, why are you running so fast? And that relationship is going to be frustrating and draining and you can't think, okay, we'll try this and it'll get better. And here's the other thing that I realized, and I've now spoken and try to encourage singles to listen to this, is usually the lukewarm believer or the non-believer pulls the believers back where they are rather than the other way. I remember hearing Chuck Swindoll decades ago talk about a white glove in mud and he says, you know, mud gets on the glove, but glove doesn't get on the mud.

It isn't a glovey mud, it's a muddy glove, you know? And then it's like, wow, that's what I was trying to do. So after that Christmas break, I remember trying to pull my girlfriend where I was and she kept pulling me back. And again, I'm not blaming her, I chose to go lukewarm and I'll never forget going to see her just three or four months later, sort of surprising her at her university.

She knew I was coming, but I was supposed to come a couple of hours later and I had her key to her room and I just kept in and she's with another guy. And it broke my heart. I remember looking at her, I'm going to marry this girl, even though now I'm thinking I should have never even been thinking I was going to marry her. And when I saw that, it was like all the things I thought I might have been seeing was, there it is.

Evidence. That's who she is. People had even told me, you don't really know who she is.

That's who she is. I remember just sort of yelling at her and they looked at me and I just slammed the door and I ran to my car and I started driving 30 miles from her university to my hometown and cried the whole way. I was devastated, like, what did I just see? What is my life?

What is happening? And I remember I got to the back door of our house, walked in. I have the greatest single mom. She loved me to death.

She's a sweetheart. She's with the Lord now, but I remember she looks at me and I'm sobbing. She's like, are you okay?

I'm like, I can't talk to you right now. I need to go to my room. I remember I walked straight to my back room, shut the door. This is my childhood bedroom, got right on my knees.

And Bob, I'm telling you right there. And then I said, okay, Jesus, I'm all in. I've been trying to control my life.

I was sort of holding on to football and I just blown out my knee and I didn't know if I play again. Well, that went real well for me. You know, I was like that one.

And I held onto this relationship with a girl. I wasn't willing to turn it over and do it God's way. And right then and there, I got on my knees and said, okay, God, obviously my plan is not a great one.

Yours is better. I choose you. I put you on the throne of my life. I'm going to do and go and be anything you want me to be.

I don't know what that is, but I'm completely all in. And here's the crazy thing. I get done with that prayer and I know at this moment I have to grow spiritually and I've been living in this town. I don't even have a church.

All I know is there's a woman named Ann Barron who's on fire. And so I say, God bumped me into her because I don't want to date her, but she's got a church and she's got a fire and that's the kind of fire I want. I think she can help me. You had never in the back of your mind thought, you know, she's kind of cute. I mean, I thought she was extremely cute. I was not attracted to date her.

I mean, people hear this and they're like, yeah, look at you. You married her. She's gorgeous. That was, I think my, I think my, I think my heart was pure, Bob. Okay.

I really meant it. Let me ask you from that bleacher conversation. Yeah. This is Dave Wilson who had been the star of the football team at the high school and he's back and he's two years older and all the girls are like, Dave Wilson's in the gym. Were you looking at him? Yeah, I thought he may be super arrogant, but he is so hot. This guy is cute. So yeah, I was attracted, but I didn't think I would ever date him or marry him or think about that. I thought he was going to get married to somebody else. And honestly, I didn't know him well enough. And so I didn't have any intention of dating him, but here's the thing, Bob. So the same night that Dave is on his knees praying, I'm working a night shift at Whirlpool, the factory, shooting screws into dishwasher doors on an assembly line.

Her dad was a Whirlpool employee. Yeah. And it was a great job for the summer making lots of money, but it's this monotonous job where you're shooting these screws in. And I remember praying this whole time like, God, what am I doing? I'm going to be in college next year.

I feel like I'm dating this guy and it's going nowhere and I shouldn't be doing things that I'm doing with him. I feel like that's pulling me back. I want to grow. And I said this prayer like, God, Jesus, I'm done playing this game. I'm going to be all in with you. I give you my life, everything, my future, my boyfriend. I will go anywhere you call me. I will do anything you want me to do. I will say whatever you want me to say, God, because I'm yours.

I am all yours from this day forward. And then I was done praying that. And at the end of my prayer, because I was new in my faith, my sister led me to Jesus.

I didn't really have anyone discipling me. I was growing on my own, going to a church. But at the end of the prayer, I thought, I wonder if Dave Wilson's home this summer. And so at the end of my prayer, I'm like, Lord, I don't know what's going on with Dave Wilson. Maybe he's married at this point.

But if you want me to bump into him and he could help me grow, help me to just somehow bump into him. Amen. So. This sounds like a dating prayer. Like a Hallmark movie.

It is a Hallmark movie. As I hear her say it, it sounds like neither one of us had the right motivations. But I'm telling you. We wanted to grow.

My motivation was pure. And the next morning I get up, of course, I don't know. She prayed that across the other side of town. And I get up and I pick up my buddy, Greg, who was my high school kicker. And we have a painting business. And so we're going to paint my grandma's house. And you're not late to your grandma's house.

Right. And so we're driving over there and I tell Greg, I said, dude, I surrendered my life to Jesus yesterday. He goes, what? You know, I told him this and I told him my prayer and literally walked through the whole thing. And I even said at the end, I even prayed to bump into Anne Barron. And I remember he goes, you're not supposed to pray for yourself.

I go, I don't know where you're supposed to pray, Greg, but that's what I prayed. You know, he goes, that's weird. So we're driving to my grandma's and we're going by the high school just on the way.

And he goes, hey, let's stop in real quick and see Coach Jones, our high school football coach. I go, no, dude, we got to get to my grandma's. We can't be late. No, come on, man. Let's go.

No, we can't. And I just say, no, we're not. He reaches over and flips the steering wheel as I'm driving. He just pushes it. And I'm like, dude.

OK. I said, OK, we'll run in there for five minutes. We run in and say, hey, Coach Jones, we're walking out.

I'm talking to Coach Jones. Greg's walking out in front of me past the tennis courts. And Greg, mister, you're not supposed to pray for yourself, goes, oh, my gosh.

God just answered your prayer, dude. I go, what? He goes, look. And I turn and there's Ann playing tennis with her mom.

Which? On this tennis court as we're walking out. I was in a tennis tournament that morning and I had played horribly. And so we were driving home and I said, oh, mom, I need to get my stroke back. Let's just stop at the high school court so we can hit a little bit and I can get my confidence back.

So we're hitting. And all of a sudden, Dave Wilson comes up to the fence and he says, hey, what are we going to play? And the truth is, I stood there, she was with her back to me and I was so afraid to say anything. Greg hits me and goes, dude, God answers your prayer. And I'm like, hey, when are we going to play tennis? Long story short, next morning we played tennis. We never played tennis.

We never did. We sat and talked about Jesus. I remember asking her, what do you want to do with your life? She said, I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm going to serve Jesus.

I believe he's got a call in my life. I remember getting in the car and going, I've never talked to an 18-year-old girl who knew what she wanted to do with her life. And it didn't matter if I was part of it or not. We started on a dating relationship unlike any dating relationship either one of us had ever been a part of because Christ was never the center. It was the first time, as you said earlier, Bob, she's sprinting on the track. I'm sprinting on the track and Jesus was the center. And I'm not saying it was this perfect dating relationship, but it was the way God has designed dating and engagement to be.

It's like, he's the beginning. We prayed at the beginning. We prayed at the end. We kept ourselves sexually pure. It was just a totally different perspective. And then when we went to the Family Life Weekend to remember, we heard, of all the things we heard, here's God's plan for your marriage.

It's bigger than you. He wants to reveal to the world who he is through marriage. So we knew we were entering a partnership. Two questions I got to ask you. The first is, when your dad, who knew Dave Wilson because he'd coached him as a baseball player, knew his reputation, knew his past, when he heard you're spending time with Dave Wilson, what did he say to you? He said, you are no longer going to see Dave Wilson. I forbid you. He barred me from the house. And I said, no, dad, Dave's different. And he goes, yeah, I don't really care if you think he's different.

I know his reputation and you are not going to date him. So, but you ignored that. You snuck out. What'd you do? I said, grandma, I think my dad was so busy doing other things and I knew that I could convince him. And we were praying about it, really praying like, Lord, I pray that you'd show my dad and my, and the high school football coach just happened to be with my dad. And the high school football coach said, hey, I hear that Ann and Dave are hanging out. And my dad said, yeah, I'm not going to let that happen. And the coach said, why wouldn't you?

He's one of the nicest guys I know. So my dad said, okay. He softened up.

Yeah, I feel like that was God. Jump ahead a little bit. You're now 19, a freshman in college and you say, Dave and I want to get married. Was your dad like, okay, cool. Actually he was because my brother was married at 20. My sister was married at 19. My other brother was 21. And so we all got married young. And by that point he really saw something different in us and he really trusted Dave.

It was pretty cool. Her dad, who wasn't a believer at the time, really saw. He told us, there is something in your relationship I've never seen.

I remember one time after our first year of marriage, he came home and we were there. And this captures what he had seen. He said, you know, I was at work today and these guys were getting in a fight on the factory line. And I said to him, you two need what Dave and Ann have. And I looked at him, I go, what's happening? What do we have?

He goes, I don't know, but that Jesus thing is real and they need it. Wow. And I'm like, what about you? So it was, I mean, as we look back, it really was. Miraculous. Oh, obviously miraculous. But Bob, do you see why we thought we wouldn't struggle? Sure.

Yeah, it's this amazing story and God's hand is all over it. And so therefore we won't have challenges in marriage. Right. And how long did it take before? Do you remember the first time you thought, I wonder if I made a mistake?

Yes. Six months, six months. And I yelled at Dave, marrying you was the biggest mistake of my life. He's the wrong person.

The right person is out there and I should go find him. You shared that story in Vertical Marriage, both the video series and the book. And that was the beginning of what I would call the second chapter of your journey, because from the miraculous beginning to the reality of married life and the challenges and the adjustments and all of the baggage you'd brought in that needed to be dealt with, God took you through a refining process to get you ready for where he has you today, speaking to hundreds of thousands of people every day on radio, on this podcast, as you speak at events. God had to take you through the refiner's fire, the purifying chapters, and those were not easy years.

But it was a part of his work to prepare you for how he wants to use you, right? God is, I get teary thinking about it because I think we had so much baggage that God was so gracious to walk through with us unloading that baggage and the pain and the things that he could have just healed automatically. But there's a beauty in God walking with us through the refinement of the fire, that we held on tight to each other even though we were fighting along that way.

But there is this amazing grace that in the midst of our pain and our struggle and our valley, God uses all those things to help other people. Yeah, and I think back, we started dating with the right perspective that Jesus is the answer, Jesus is our source of life, not the person I'm dating, and then you forget. We started our marriage the same way, and within months we're like, you need to do this and you need to be this so that I can be happy, and where are our eyes? Our eyes are on our spouse rather than, no, no, no, it's back to Jesus is the source. And, you know, last thing I'll say is, you know, in the book of Revelation, he speaks a revelation to John and he says, you've lost your first love to a church. And it's interesting what he says to do, repent and do the things you did at first. And so when you think about that in our marriage or anyone's marriage, it's like, repent means go back and put him back on the throne or vertical is what we call it. Remember what you were doing when you're dating? When you really were passionate in love and you pursued with a reckless abandon?

Do that again. We started out in prayer, ended in prayer. Yeah, you get lazy and I can do it, and I hope if you're listening as a single person, you're like, I want to do dating and engagement God's way. And again, I'm not saying we did it perfectly, but there is a way that he says to do in his word and it's the right way. And if you're married, go back.

If you've lost those feelings, if you're in a rough place, go back and do the things you did at first. And if you need a refresher and you can get to one of the weekend to remember getaways this spring, do that. Like I said, we're going to have about a dozen of those this spring. You can find out more when you go to familylifetoday.com. They're going to be socially distanced events, so we expect they will sell out a ballroom that has a thousand people capacity. We may have 200 people in that event. And it's life changing.

It can be. Go find out more at familylifetoday.com. And then find out more about Dave and Ann's story. Get a copy of their book, Vertical Marriage, or get the small group study and go through the messages from Vertical Marriage with other couples. Go online at familylifetoday.com for more information about these resources or call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. And seriously, if you haven't read Vertical Marriage, get a copy and start the new year with a great book on marriage from Dave and Ann Wilson. Go to familylifetoday.com for more information about the book or call us at 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. As we start the new year, we want to say a thank you to those of you who, during the month of December, responded to the matching gift challenge that had been laid out in front of us here at Family Life. We're still getting mail from some of you, and it'll be a few days before we know the final outcome, but we are so grateful for those of you who responded and who voted for us.

Really, that's what you were doing. When you made a donation here at year end, you were saying, Family Life Today matters for me, for my community, for our country. This is a critical time in our nation for a biblical truth about marriage and family to be available to more and more people, and you're helping to make that happen through your donations to this ministry. So thank you to those of you who donated in December, and thanks to those of you who will continue to support us in 2021. We're going to need your help this year, and we just want to say thanks in advance for your financial support of this ministry. And we hope you can join us tomorrow when we're going to talk about the habits that helped to create a joy-filled marriage. Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi join us, and we hope you can be back with us as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.