When you reach the latter years of life, you become thankful not only for what God did for you, but also what He did not do that you may have thought you wanted at the time.

Case in point is the three young ladies I was in love with, somewhat. In telling the story, it’s hard to keep it brief.  I apologize for my tendency to wander. Oh, and I’ve altered the names of the first two girls.

I grew up in Winston County, Alabama.  When I was 11 we moved back to Alabama from the West Virginia mining camp (near Beckley) where we had lived for four years.  Since the mines had closed and we had nowhere to live, we moved in with our newly widowed grandmother, Sarah Kilgore, my mom’s mother.  How in the world our family–there were eight of us!–crowded into that small farmhouse is beyond me.  But I have no memories of a problem.

After a year or so, we moved to the house on the next ridge when my uncle Ted Spain, married to Mom’s younger sister Ruth, became forest ranger in Guntersville, Alabama.  It was a four-room house with a screened-in back porch, sitting on 107 acres, that Dad rented from Uncle Ted for the princely sum of $75/year.

In 1951, my siblings would be 16 years old (Ron), 15 (Glenn), 13 (Patricia), 9 (Carolyn), and 7 (Charlie).

Since Dad was unable to find a job in any of the local coal mines–this was all he had done since he quit school at the age of 12 to work alongside his dad and his uncles–Dad began farming.  And his sons learned to plow.

My first girl-friend.  Now, as a teenager on the farm, there was no dating as such. We had no money and no car. Furthermore, none of my siblings were dating as far as I could tell. So, I learned nothing about girls and dating etiquette from anyone in our family.

The first time I saw Joy she was in the sixth grade.  I passed her classroom each day since the school cafeteria was just beyond it. Sometimes she would be leaving her room to walk home, which was just across the street.  I was instantly taken. She was cute, cute, cute.

Next year.  She’s in the seventh grade, I’m in the tenth.  And because the junior and senior high at Winston County High School shared the same building, the same hallways, and sometimes the same rooms, Joy and I were in a study hall together.  And since some of my classmates attended the Methodist church where she belonged, they told me all about her and soon connected us.

There was no dating. No money, no car, no opportunities.  Over the next year or two, we would meet up at school functions.  And then, one summer her dad took a job with the school board in Jasper, county seat for Walker County, just to our south.  That was a minor problem, but not a major one. We saw each other rarely anyway, and sometimes when Dad would drive to the mines at Gorgas, AL (he did eventually find work), I would ride with him.  He would drop me off at Joy’s house at 2 o’clock and pick me up that night on his way home, sometime after 11.  Such was our dating.

When I was a senior in high school, I would sometimes borrow my brother Glenn’s car so Joy and I would go to a drive-in movie. When I went off to college, she was in the 10th grade in the high school in Jasper.  We wrote almost every day. I dated no one at college, even though there were plenty of possibilities.  (At the end of the year, an attractive classmate wrote in my annual something about how foolish I had been to have a girlfriend back at home!)  And the interesting thing about that is…

After I transferred to a college in Birmingham the next year, we broke up.

Actually, I broke us up.  I wanted more from a relationship than the one-dimensional thing Joy and I had going.  When I asked, “What would you like to do tonight?” she never had a suggestion.  When I asked, “Where would you like to eat tonight?” she had no opinion. She was not interested in school, never read a book. And I realized I was bored with her.

When I ended it, she was angry.  “I’ve given you the best years of my life,” she said.  She was seventeen.

Before a year had gone by, she had married a classmate of mine.

My second girlfriend.  Sharon lived in Bessemer, just to the west of Birmingham.  She was 16, I was 19.

The most interesting thing about our relationship is how we met.

I was living with Joel Davis in a apartment close to the college, two blocks down the street from the rooming house where Joel and I first met.  He had joined our church, joined the choir, and we had become great friends.  Joel was older than me.  In fact, he moved to Birmingham just after getting out of the Navy and was managing the Roadway Express office.

Joel was dating Nancy, and one Friday night he was going to drive across town to see her, but not until she got off work at 9 o’clock. So, he and I drove downtown and went to a movie in the wonderful old “Alabama” theater (it’s still there, unbelievably ornate inside).  When it came time to leave, he would take the car across town to see Nancy, and I would ride the city bus home. No problem.

Here’s what happened

Inside the movie, I became aware of the two young women on the row behind us.  One had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. They were huge.  When our eyes connected, she smiled at me–and I was hooked.  I had no idea, of course, she was only 16.  She was, you will understand the expression, mature for her age.

After a bit, Joel got up to leave and I went with him.  Outside the theater, it occurred to me that I did not want to go home just then, that what I would really like to do was to stick around and meet this girl when they came out of the theater.  So, Joel left and I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the cinema.

I realized I did not even have a pencil to jot down the girl’s phone number, assuming she would give it to me.  Down the sidewalk sat a blind man selling pencils.  Probably a nickel each.  So, I bought one.

In time, the girls exited the theater.  Now, I had to do something bold, which was completely untypical for me.  I walked up and spoke to Sharon.

“Hey, Uh, I don’t know exactly how to go about this.  But I saw you inside the theater.  May I have your phone number?”

She wasn’t sure about giving her phone number to a stranger. We must have chatted a little, and then she gave me her number.

Next day at work–my college job was weekends at the railroad terminal, running the office for the Pullman Company–I called her and we must have talked an hour.

We dated some, borrowing Joel’s car.  We double dated with Joel being paired with the other girl whom he did not care for at all.  We had them to our apartment for pizza.  And one Sunday I drove to Bessemer and took her to church with me.

I never once kissed her.  And much of the time she giggled about boys she had met at Panama City beach.  As I say, she was 16, I was 19 and in college.

And we ended it.

Something funny.  Years later, Sharon was working for the phone company and met my sister.  And in the late 1980s when I was pastoring in Charlotte NC, the Baptist association north of Birmingham flew me down to speak at their annual meeting.  My photo ran in the Birmingham News.  Sharon saw it and wrote me a letter at the church.

You can imagine my surprise.  She and I had last seen each other in 1960 and this was over 25 years later.  The letter was interesting.

Letting you go was the mistake of my life, was the gist of it.  Something to that effect. I don’t recall the rest of it.

I called my wife Margaret at home and read it to her.  I said, “If you will agree, I will write her a nice little note to say, ‘Thanks for the letter,’ and wish her well.”

Margaret said, “Throw the letter away..”  So I did.

Interestingly, these days Sharon is a Facebook friend.  We have seen each other exactly one time for a few minutes in all the years since.

My third girlfriend became my wife of 52 years.

Margaret Henderson was in the youth group at West End Baptist Church.  She was two years younger than me.  Tall and statuesque.  Smart and sometimes outspoken.  And when she drove (her dad’s car), I was impressed by the confidence with which he navigated the streets.  A little too fast for my comfort, but I admired the confidence.  Nothing timid about this young lady.

There are too many aspects to our relationship, our courting, and of course our marriage to go into here. We wed on a Friday night in April 1962, just a few weeks after I had finished college.  (They were drafting eligible young men who were unmarried and not in college, and I did not care to risk it. The Lord had called me into the ministry and I needed to get on with His plans.)

We continued living in Birmingham for two years, to save a little money before heading to seminary in New Orleans.  I took a job with a cast iron pipe company in Tarrant City, just north of B’ham, as secretary to the production manager.  The ad said, “Must be male and must be able to take shorthand.”  The same thing, incidentally, that the Pullman Company job announcement had said when I was in college. The railroad job wanted a man because I would be in the yards alone for much of the weekend, and the cast iron pipe company wanted a man because he would be working near the foundry with 300 iron workers.

I pastored a tiny church 25 miles up the highway at Kimberly, Alabama, for 14 months.  Then, the pastor of Central Baptist in Tarrant, located a few blocks from the pipe plant, asked me to become his assistant.  Morris Freeman said, “We don’t have any money to pay you, but you can live in the old pastorium.”  To save monthly rent sounded good to me, and I  was doing a poor job of pastoring in Kimberly.  The six months at Central were wonderful and then we moved off to New Orleans for seminary.

Margaret became pregnant a month or two after we married.  Neil (Joe Neil, Jr) was born in February of 1963.  These days he is a human resources manager at the shipyards in Pascagoula and chairman of deacons at West Mobile Baptist Church.

The Lord took Margaret to Heaven in January 2015.  She was only 72 but had been dealing with numerous health issues for years.  She was God’s wife, chosen by Him for me, and me for her, if I may say so.

After her passing, I realized that even though she sometimes chafed at the role of pastor’s wife, marrying a pastor was a very positive thing in her life.  Her siblings had a ton of issues with faith in God, and I’m confident Margaret would have too, except for one big thing:  When you are married to the pastor, you will go to church on  Sunday.  Staying home is not an option.  That way, she worked her way through questions that plagued her.  She had wonderful Christian friends and was able to grow and to serve.  She taught a women’s Sunday School class and loved it.

Before ending this, something humorous.

In the year after Margaret died, my first girlfriend Joy contacted me.  She was in Texas, divorced from the guy she had married on the rebound who had given her several sons.  Then, she remarried and was later widowed.  Twice more in fact.

And now, it began to appear that she wanted to make me husband number four.

I ran.  You may believe I ran.

And two years after Margaret left for Heaven, I married Bertha and moved up to Ridgeland, MS.  I am not writing about her as “girlfriend number four,” because she never was that.  As I write (July 2026) we are nearing our tenth anniversary and she is dealing with major health problems, and I am her caregiver.  I’m 86 and she reaches that number in one month.

God is faithful. We thank Him forever.