Welcome to Our Family Pages

The Lord has blessed me with a lovely wife, and four wonderful children.  This section of our site will link you to individual web pages of my wife Linda, and our children.

Beloved Honeydarlings

How our family began

In the fall of 1977, I was a student at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  As a young man, I was very zealous for the things of God and tried to encourage my pastor back home in Terre Haute to adopt new ideas about worship and outreach.  

One of the practices I found intriguing at the time was that many Tulsa churches leased city buses on Sunday mornings and sent them to ORU to pick up students for services.  I thought this would be an excellent thing for my home church to do and I asked the pastor that summer if I could buy an ad in the Indiana Statesmen and set it up with our church bus driver to pick up students at ISU.

The Pastor agreed, I designed the ad, and then went off for the fall semester to Tulsa.  In the meantime, a pretty, shy, intelligent young lady from New Albany, Indiana was preparing to leave home for the first time to attend college in Terre Haute.  Linda Sue Harvey arrived at ISU about the same time I had left for ORU.  It wasn't her first trip to ISU, she had attended summer honors programs during her high school years, but it was the beginning of an exciting adventure that would change both of our lives forever.

One of Linda's goals when she arrived at ISU was to visit every church in town.  She had her own reasons for this, which she might share on her personal page, but it was very timely for her to pick up the first fall issue of the Statesman and see the ad I had placed there.  Just like a lot of other college freshmen, away from home for the first time, Linda stayed up later than usual on the weekends making new friends and checking out the town.  Although she was very tired early Sunday morning, she got up and dressed, and made her way to the designated corner where the bus from Calvary Temple was supposed to pick her up.

She waited.  And waited.  And waited.  The bus never came.  Linda went back to the dorm and upstairs to her room.  She had almost given up when her roommate peered out from under her blankets and said, "I thought you said you were going to church."  This was all it took to give Linda the resolve to pick up the paper and check the ad again.  Yes, just as she remembered, there was a telephone number to call!  Linda dialed the phone and a male voice answered at the other end.  She explained about the ad, and waiting on the corner for such a long time, and wondering why the bus never came, and a sympathetic voice at the other end said, "Well!  So Randy put that ad in the paper did he?  He never told me anything about it!  You wait right there and I'll be right over to pick you up!"  And that was the beginning of Linda's association with Calvary Temple.  She never made it to any of the other churches in town.

At the end of the semester I finished my finals and went back home.  As usual, our Pastor had been rehearsing the choir for our annual Living Christmas Tree.  I arrived home late Friday night and had to learn all the music for dress rehearsal Saturday evening.  The date was Sunday, December 18, 1977.  The morning service went by and at 7:00 PM I was standing near the top of the Christmas Tree getting ready to sing, "Oh Holy Night".  As I was preparing to sing, the door opened to the back of the sanctuary and in walked the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life!  My eyes followed her as she came up the stairs, and she looked heavenly in the soft candelight.  I was so enthralled with her appearance that I forgot what I was doing and forgot the words to my song.  Suddenly pulled back into the reality of the moment, I looked over at Mrs. Saunders on the organ and said, "Mrs. Saunders, could we begin again, please?"  Later, Linda told me how this impressed her.

After the service ended, it took me very little time to find my way to the back of the sanctuary to introduce myself to Linda.  I asked if I could drive her home and she said yes, so  being the impetuous teenager I was, I told my mom to give me the keys to her car so I could drive Linda back to her dorm.  That is how I met my wife through a newspaper ad.