Dad, Tell Me About the Time (36)

Thursday, August 29, 2024

When did you know you wanted to get married?

This is a weird one because there wasn’t a moment that I knew I wanted to marry Lisa but rather, as we dated, we just started talking more and more about the family we would have. There was a point however when I decided that I should ask my Heavenly Father if Lisa was the right person for me to marry. I found a quiet and secluded spot, knelt in prayer, and asked my Father in Heaven if I was supposed to marry Lisa. The answer was a very powerful and warm feeling that overcame my entire body. I knew she was the one for me.

The funny thing is, that we both knew that the time was not right to get married right away and that we needed to wait at least another year. Lisa was still quite young and in high school and my family was having a hard time coming up to speed with me “robbing the cradle”, so we waited another year. My patriarchal blessing actually points out that we would have to wait to get married. The exact words are, “when the time is right, you and this young lady, you will know when the right one has come into your life, through your humble prayers and the promptings of the Holy Ghost…when the time comes for you, you will be married in the temple for time and for all eternity…”.

To try and help things, we decided that during that summer Lisa would go to Cardston and work in our families Steadmans store and I would stay in Edmonton and work at the City of Edmonton Police Department. I was their quarter master in the supply room.

Of course my family fell in love with Lisa and although they had their reservations, no one gave us any more grief. Well, Gaylia didn’t give us grief but she made sure that everyone else knew that she was dead set against us getting married and that our marriage wouldn’t last. Years later we found out that she actually told her young womens class that we wouldn’t make it. Well, forty three years later here we are. It was during this time period that I wrote my dandelion poem.