Chapter 1: Before There Was An “Us”

Chapter 1: Before There Was An “Us”

The first negotiation

I ran full speed from the barn where I was in the middle of milking cows, burst into the empty house, dialed the number I had memorized, and blurted out the words I had been rehearsing: “My name is Calvin Sayler, I am in your shop class. I was wondering if you might be interested in going to the Zap school play next Friday night with me?”

She said she would have to ask her dad first. It wasn’t a “No,” it was a definite “Maybe.”

That was our first real conversation. The lifelong negotiation had begun.

But we are getting ahead of the story.

A Farm Boy and a Ranch Girl

Before there was an us, there was a farm boy from Zap and a ranch girl from Beulah.

Calvin did not know Patience yet, at least not in any meaningful way. Patience did not know Calvin either, except perhaps as one of the Sayler boys from that small Pentecostal church in town. We were living separate lives in the same rural county, shaped by different homes, different schools, and different churches. We were not thinking about family systems or personality differences or the way two people carry whole histories into a relationship.

We were just young.

Calvin was sixteen, restless, talkative, and trying to figure out whether there was any girl in Mercer County he would actually be allowed to date.

Patience was seventeen, quiet and cautious, comfortable with books and music and horses, mostly doing the next thing in front of her, and not especially convinced that her life needed a boy in it unless he turned out to be both safe and interesting.

God had already been shaping both stories. We did not see that then, because most of the time formation just feels like ordinary life.

Calvin: From Town Kid to Farm Boy

I was born in Hebron, North Dakota, a small town of about a thousand people. For the first ten years of my life, I was a town kid.

I do not remember everything about those years, but I remember one day very clearly because it felt like life changed without warning. I was playing baseball in a vacant lot two or three blocks from our little house when my brother came running and said, “We’re moving.”

That was news to me.

I came home and there was a grain truck backed up to our house. My dad was there, and furniture was being carried out. Nobody sat us down ahead of time and explained that this was the plan. We were confused, but also excited, because we were told we were moving to a farm. We had never lived on a farm.

We had visited my grandparents’ farm, and my dad worked there during the week. Later we learned that my grandfather wanted the move planned around the farm work, so apparently the timing made sense to the adults. To us boys, it felt like somebody had suddenly turned the page in our childhood and expected us to keep right on reading.

There had been one odd warning before that. About six months earlier, over Christmas break, we were told we were moving. We said goodbye to our friends at school, and then, for reasons that were not explained to us, we did not move. We simply came back to school. That was how things worked in my family: adults made decisions; children adjusted.

This time the truck really was there. We loaded the furniture, got in the car, and followed the grain truck 35 miles north to the farm. The dusty old house had not been lived in for fourteen years. I remember the porch giving way while we were moving things in because the wood was rotten. Somebody had to scramble for planks so we could keep carrying furniture inside. That was our initial introduction to farm life.

For us town boys, that first summer felt like an adventure. I was ten, my younger brother was eight and my older brother was eleven. My sister was still little, only one or two. There was space to run, places to explore, old buildings to inspect, animals to watch, and all the mystery a farm holds for a curious boy.

But practical farm life took over quickly. My brothers and I became useful to my dad and granddad, and useful children on a farm got used. My grandfather bought what felt like enough paint to cover the whole county, maybe fifty gallons of it. White paint for the house and other buildings, red paint for the barns. We were handed brushes and buckets and told to paint. That was our real introduction to being farm kids.

Town kids looked forward to summer because summer meant freedom. We started to dread summer because summer meant work.

A lot of that work was picking rocks. You walked through the fields, bent down, picked up big rocks with your hands, and threw them onto a wagon pulled by a tractor. The rocks had to come out of the fields because they could damage machinery during planting and harvest.

We pulled giant weeds in our huge potato field. (A gallon of potatoes was the foundation of almost every meal my mom cooked for a family with three growing boys.) We lifted 60-pound square bales of prickly hay by hand, one at a time, up onto a wagon, then off onto a haystack. Six months later and a hundred degrees colder, we would help dad load them back on a truck to haul to where the hungry cows were waiting.

There were chickens and pigs to feed, eggs to gather, dairy cows to milk, and occasionally barns to clean, cattle to work—which meant vaccinating, branding, and castrating calves—and animals to butcher. It was physical, dirty work. Often the whole family was involved: my grandparents, my parents, my brothers, my aunt and uncle, and a hired man named John.

That was the world that shaped me. But I did not think of it as formation then; I just knew it was work.

Looking back, I can see that farm life gave me some things I needed: plenty of time outside with animals, machinery, weather, and adults; a sense that hard work was normal and children had to contribute. It also gave me some things I would have to sort through later: the feeling that life could change suddenly without explanation, and the sense that adults made decisions and children simply adjusted.

By the time I was teenager, I was no longer the town kid from Hebron. I was a farm boy from Zap.

Patience: From Ranch Girl to Town Kid

My childhood was secure—my parents cared about each other, worked well as a team, and loved me beyond a doubt. I didn’t realize what a gift that was at the time, because whatever you grow up with feels normal.

I was an only child and a definite introvert growing up on a 5,500-acre ranch twelve miles from the nearest small town. My first friends were dogs, cats, horses, and my Aunt Bertha, who lived with us and helped my mom run our five-bedroom, two-story 1910 Sears & Roebuck ranch home. That might sound lonely to some people, but it suited me perfectly.

The first big crack in my perfect world came when I was eleven and my dad sold the ranch we all loved. His motives were noble—he was over sixty, had a heart condition, and as a girl I was not likely to take over the ranch someday. He wanted to settle Mom and me into a comfortable but more manageable home in town in case the next heart attack got him. That was his way of showing love: it was practical, protective, and thoughtful. But all our hearts broke a little, mine probably for the first time.

So at around the same time Calvin became a farm boy, I became a town kid.

His Normal and Her Normal

Every child grows up inside a definition of normal.

At the time, we do not call it that. We simply think, “This is how life works.This is how families talk. This is how parents make decisions. This is what faith looks like. This is how rules are enforced. This is what counts as respect and what counts as rebellion. This is how affection is shown. This is how disappointment feels. This is what gets praised and what gets corrected. This is what gets avoided.”

Our childhood normal is powerful because we absorb it before we have enough maturity to question it. And it shapes our character; it shapes how we view ourselves and how we interpret the world around us every day.

When two people marry, those normals meet. Sometimes they fit together easily, but sometimes they clash almost immediately. And when they clash, couples often assume they are only reacting to the present moment, when in reality the present moment is stirring up assumptions and sensitivities that were formed years earlier in two very different homes.

We did not recognize any of that in high school. We did not have words like family system, coping strategy, or learned habits. But we had all of them anyway.

Calvin: School Was Painful

I was not what anyone would have called a polished young man. I had energy, words, and opinions, and I also knew how to get into mischief. I could talk and joke and smile. I could act like things did not bother me.

I also carried more insecurity than anyone probably knew.

School had not been kind to me; I had been bullied early. One older kid put gum in my hair on the bus on purpose, just to be mean, and somehow that seemed to tell the rest of the world I was fair game. Someone cut the sleeves off my new winter coat at school because they thought it was funny. Teachers told me I was not working up to my potential, which was probably true, but when a boy already feels small, that kind of truth just feels like one more person telling you that you are not enough.

So I had this strange combination inside. I wanted to be good, but I pushed the edges. I wanted approval, but I acted like I did not need it. I wanted to be taken seriously, but I had not yet learned how to take myself seriously.

Meanwhile, Patience’s world was developing very differently.

Patience: Town, School, and Boys

Town life was an adjustment for a ranch kid. One neighbor girl saw a new friend opportunity and appeared at my door every single day until I finally fumbled something rude enough to keep her at bay. An introvert gets plenty of socialization at school and definitely does not need it piled on every afternoon. I was learning I had limits—which sometimes came out awkwardly.

School itself came easily. I was always a good student and an avid reader. In first grade, I could read every word in our reading textbook on day one. My mom said I figured it out from watching the words go by in the hymnbook during congregational singing at church. Before I was ten, I had already read the 500-page Catherine Marshall novel Christy, even though in hindsight the story was way over my young head. In high school, I happily took the hardest classes Beulah High School offered: chemistry, physics, trigonometry and calculus. I liked the feeling of competence when I mastered an intellectual challenge.

Music was by far my passion. I started piano lessons in second grade, partly out of guilt: my mom wished she had taken lessons when she was young but her family could not afford it. Reading music came almost as easily as reading words. I tried girls’ basketball in eighth grade, only to break my ankle halfway through the season and fall way behind my peers, never to return. I tried track and field one year and kind of liked running hurdles, but felt like I almost died running an 880 once. So, having ruled out sports rather quickly, I played clarinet and saxophone in every instrumental group at school and I became one of the primary accompanists for concert choir, swing choir, friends’ instrumental solos, plus preludes, postludes, and congregational singing at church.

I also loved horses. Back on the ranch, I treasured every chance to ride along with my dad. I remember one late fall day when I begged to come along for some kind of cattle sorting. Snowflakes began to fall, and my feet were freezing in the stirrups, but I stubbornly insisted I was fine because I did not want to be sent home early. It may have been one of the few times in my childhood that I lied to my parents.

Horsemanship drew me into the local rural 4-H club so I could show my horse in summer fairs. The side benefit was that I also learned sewing skills, presentation skills, and leadership skills along the way. I remember feeling very grown up competing at the state fair in Minot—until my horse overdid a sliding stop, reared up on his hind legs, and I plopped into the dirt in front of the crowd. Of course, the only thing to do was pick up my hat and get back on. That is what a cowgirl did, and I was a cowgirl.

My parents valued family, hard work, education, and character, and they encouraged me in any pursuit connected to those values. They came to my concerts and horse shows and whatever else I tried. Their praise was modest but sincere, and that was all I needed. I was good at enough things to have perhaps above-average self-confidence, but from my parents’ example I knew better than to be cocky or boastful about any of it.

I never felt like a typical girl. I viewed many of them as a little shallow and petty, and I did not mind terribly that I was different. I did wish I was prettier and better at doing my hair and a little makeup, but I did not wish it strongly enough to make beauty a time-consuming routine in my teen life, or since for that matter. So of course, I was not one of those girls who planned out her wedding in junior high and doodled her name alongside some boy’s last name to see how cute it looked. I do not recall thinking a lot about marriage at all, though I am sure I assumed I would get married someday. At the same time, I liked boys as people and sometimes felt more comfortable hanging out with them than with girls.

But rest assured I was not boy crazy. I noticed certain boys, yes, and wondered at times whether any of them noticed me. Unfortunately, most of the boys I knew, even those in my church, did not seem as serious about their faith in God as I was. That mattered a lot to me. I was definitely concerned about moral boundaries, even while I was still trying to figure out exactly what those boundaries were. I think I assumed that only boys who were serious about their faith would be safe and would have similar moral boundaries to mine around things like drinking, smoking, partying, and sex.

Calvin did not know it then, but this assumption really set him up to be an attractive option for me.

Calvin: A List of One

When we moved to the farm, my family joined a conservative Pentecostal church, at the insistence of my grandfather. It was the Cleveland, Tennessee brand of the Church of God denomination. In North Dakota, there were not many of those churches around, so if you were part of one, it was not just a place you attended. It was a whole world.

We went to church a lot: Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, youth group, revival meetings. If the doors were open, there was a pretty good chance we were supposed to be there. My parents took us, and we did not really have a vote.

Certain things got drilled into us. One of them was that we should not date girls who were not in our church, which meant our denomination, our faith world, our kind of people. That sounded spiritual, and I suppose it was meant to be protective, but it created a practical problem. Our church had fewer than a hundred people, and most of the girls were either cousins or felt like cousins because we had grown up together in Sunday school and youth group. I was not really interested in that dating pool, and I am pretty sure that dating pool was not all that interested in me either.

And I wanted to date.

So one evening I challenged my mother, “Is there any girl in our county I could date?” It wasn’t a deep theological question; it was a teenage farm boy asking whether there was any hope inside the approved boundaries.

My mother did not hesitate. “There is a girl over in Beulah,” she said. “Her name is Patience Murray.” That was the first time I remember her name entering my life.

I did not know her. I did not know what she looked like. But because my mother said her name so quickly and confidently, I assumed this girl must be something. Maybe she was so spectacular, so beautiful, so top shelf that I had no chance at all. But at least there was a list beyond the walls of my little church—even if that list had only one name on it.

That is how some life-changing seasons begin: not with great fanfare or a thunderous voice from heaven. Just your mother mentioning a name while you peel potatoes in the kitchen and try to figure out whether your dating future is hopeless.

Patience Murray.

I did not know it then, but that name was going to change my life.

Patience: First Steps of Faith

Faith was something I learned from my mom.

She came from a very strict Christian family and was the most sincere of all her siblings about prioritizing her own faith and letting it guide her choices. Even as a busy wife and mother running a ranch house, I remember seeing her sit in her favorite living room chair with her big King James Bible open on her lap for a few minutes every day. That picture stayed with me. She didn’t talk about faith very often, but I absorbed more from her example than I learned in Sunday School—and I went to Sunday School every week.

When I was eleven, I remember sitting in our little Congregational church listening to a guest speaker give a rare invitation to make a personal decision to trust Jesus as Savior. My heart was racing as felt the deep conviction that this time I was supposed to respond. The problem was that I had sat through a handful of these invitations before, and the initial “raise your hand if God is speaking to you” part was always followed by the much more embarrassing “come up to the front for prayer” part.

In our church, coming to the front for anything other than a planned speech or song was very rare and felt way too personal. So, it took exceptional courage for me to raise my hand that day. It turns out God has a sense of humor, because that day the guest speaker had to leave quickly for another engagement, and he skipped the come-up-to-the-front part completely. I got saved without having to leave my seat.

Maybe that was not all for the best, though. As an avid reader, I had read Christian youth books, and all the people who made the big decision to accept Jesus and become a Christian seemed to have an immediate emotional experience: clouds parted and birds sang, or they had some other great and wonderful feeling to confirm their salvation was real. I just felt relieved that the moment had passed and the decision was done.

On top of that, I was already a good kid, so my actual daily behavior was not dramatically different either. Hence for much of my teen years, I wondered whether I had done it right, whether I was really saved, and why I did not feel any different. Eventually I chose to trust what I was taught and what the Bible said, regardless of feelings. But it was not the last time my lack of feelings would cause me grief.

Seeds of a Shared Faith

Faith is often inherited before it is understood.

A boy goes to church because the family goes to church. A girl watches her mother sit with an open Bible and senses, before she can explain it, that this habit is meaningful. We learn songs, prayers, and phrases long before faith becomes fully personal. Eventually, somewhere along the way, inherited faith has to become our own.

That happened differently for us.

It is easy to assume that if two people share the same faith tradition, their spiritual life will naturally align once they are married. But spiritual life is not simply about belief; it is about habits and rhythms each person brings from the home they came from. Two people can love the same God and still bring very different spiritual instincts into the marriage.

Calvin’s faith world was louder, more expressive, more rule-conscious, and more emotional. Patience’s faith was quieter, more interior, more connected to Scripture, conscience, and trust without dramatic feelings. Both were real. Both were incomplete. Both would keep growing.

At this point in the story, though, we were not comparing spiritual traditions. Calvin had a name tucked away in his mind. Patience had her own life to live. And neither of us knew that our stories were about to converge.

Calvin: Her Name had a Face

After my mother told me there was a girl named Patience Murray over in Beulah, I saddled a horse, rode dramatically across the prairie, and found her standing in a golden North Dakota sunset.

Oh wait. That was the Hollywood version of our story.

In the real version, I was a sixteen-year-old farm boy with no car of my own, no great plan, and no evidence that this girl my mother had named would have any reason to be interested in me. So life just went on.

Then our little school in Zap had the opportunity to send a few students to Beulah, eight miles away, for a shop class. I signed up, along with three other kids from our school. What I did not know was that the class in Beulah would include about twenty-five girls—now that was a different dating pool!

I do not want to over-spiritualize the simple choice to sign up for a class. But when I look back, I do see the kindness of God in the ordinary. My mother had spoken the name of an eligible girl. Then, without any plan on my part, I ended up in the same class with that very girl for an entire semester. Suddenly Patience Murray was no longer only a name—she was a person in the room. And I was hoping she would notice that I existed.

Patience: Noticing Him

From my side, Intro to Shop had nothing to do with Calvin.

I signed up because I was interested in learning a little about woodworking and welding—not as career skills, but just so I would not be clueless. My dad used to weld broken haying machinery in the machine shed on the ranch. I learned to stay away if I saw the bright light of the torch because it was hard on the eyes if you were not wearing a face shield. But keeping my distance also kept me curious, just enough to want to learn a little. The serious agriculture students were already taking a four-year series of shop classes, so this one-semester Intro class attracted mostly girls like me who were dabbling.

I remember my welding project, a saddle rack. I remember seeing the Zap boys in the class. I cannot say I remember an actual conversation with Calvin before the phone call. I suspect I first noticed Calvin before he noticed me, but not in shop class.

I had attended a joint youth group event between my church and his church. My radar was on the lookout for boys who took their faith seriously, and I had the impression that was true for the teens in his church.

It was a small Pentecostal church with a reputation in town for more emotional and sometimes even downright strange activities, like weekly altar calls, a foot-washing ceremony, and speaking out loud during services in a strange tongue or language. But its members generally had a reputation for being sincere Christians rather than a social club, more so than many churches in town at the time.

So I noticed who was in that youth group. Calvin and his brothers made up a significant percentage of the guys. He had two brothers, one slightly older and one a couple years younger. I think I dismissed Duane as too young. I perceived Mike, the oldest, as the most mature, which was a plus for him, but he was also much quieter.

Calvin had the best smile.

Still does.

He had lots of dark curly hair and freckles, and he was easy to look at.

Still is.

My first impression of him, which has held true, was that he had a good heart and a mischievous streak. This must have been the magic combination that eventually hooked me. The good heart made him safe, while the mischievous streak made him exciting and adventurous.

What more could a girl want?

Well, maybe a little less adventure on the ride home.

But we are getting ahead of the story.

Reflections for Couples:

One of the beautiful opportunities in marriage is that couples are not required to repeat everything they inherited. They are free to choose the best of what shaped them and leave the rest behind. Marriage becomes a place where two histories meet and something new begins to form: a new family culture, a new way of speaking, a new set of patterns that may eventually shape the lives of children and grandchildren.

But that kind of new beginning only happens when couples are willing to talk honestly about where they came from. And understanding does not come through accusation; it emerges through curiosity. Ask each other some curious questions about the family they grew up in, like these:

·       What are some of your best childhood memories?

·       What parts of childhood were difficult for you?

·       How did your family handle conflict?

·       How was affection expressed in your home?

·       What did you learn about faith as a child?

·       What did you admire about your parents’ marriage?

·       What patterns do you want to repeat, and what patterns do you want to leave behind?

These conversations can be tender. Memories surface. Loyalties are involved. Emotions can run deep. So be gentle with each other. The goal is not to analyze or judge each other’s families; the goal is to help a husband and wife understand how the past is still shaping the present. Because when you begin to understand why your spouse reacts the way he or she does, grace comes more easily.