September 25, 2025 • 72 mins
Charlette Lewis married an Air Force officer and spent many years as a military wife. Through the difficulties of that lifestyle, she decided to give up on her marriage. Charlette filed for divorce and took the children to live on the opposite side of the country from her ex-husband. In this episode, Charlette tells the story of how she found Christ and how God restored and redeemed the relationships in her life.
This shorter clip tells of his conversion and their remarriage.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
We're still learning a lot of things,
but as the Lord leads us and we're learning,
if we stick with His word,
we're gonna get there eventually.
And I mean, we're never gonna totally arrive
until we get to heaven, but you know,
the Lord is good and brings us,
starts with where we are and just takes us along.
(00:28):
Charlette, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for being willing to come on
and share your story today.
Thank you.
So let's start at the beginning.
And I know there's a lot of different angles
and pieces to your story and layers
and all kinds of stuff we're gonna get into,
but let's rewind and
start with where were you born
and were you raised in a religious family?
(00:49):
Tell me a little bit about your upbringing years.
I was born in Oklahoma.
My parents had been married several years
before they had me and they were
kind of a jack of all trades.
So they left me with my grandmother
while they figured out
what they wanted to do in life
until I was about four.
And she was a very godly lady.
(01:11):
She took me to church every Sunday
and all of the relatives were nearby.
And so we had Sunday dinners with everybody
and she gave me a lot of good Bible teaching
and I heard a lot.
But then when my parents had decided
what they were gonna do, we moved to Texas
and I never got to church again until I guess
(01:39):
when we would visit my grandmother
or until probably we moved to Arkansas
and I would ask somebody
would invite me to their church.
And I was in junior high in high school
and I would go with them.
And my mother was good about taking me
and dropping me off and Mother's Day and Easter,
(02:00):
she would go to church with me.
But other than that, it wasn't really much.
And so I was always seeking
how to come closer to the Lord
because I'd heard about him
but there was more head
knowledge than heart knowledge.
Just wanted to know this Jesus.
(02:22):
And so I was always kind of
listening to what everybody,
I mean, at one time I even had a Jewish friend.
She took me to the synagogue.
I said, "If Jesus was a Jew,
then I should become a Jew."
But when the rabbi asked me questions
and I said that Jesus was a Savior,
I kind of, he said, "That's not gonna work."
(02:45):
Oh, that's interesting.
What kind of church is it that your mother
was taking you to, you said
on Mother's Day and Easter?
Was there a certain denomination?
Mainly Baptist, because we were in the South.
Oh, sure.
And her mother was a
independent conservative Baptist.
So that was mainly where she would go.
(03:07):
But I tried Methodist and
Episcopalian and Presbyterian
and Baptist, different kinds
of Baptists and everything.
So at some point in this
story, though, you end up,
if I'm getting this
right, you end up in California
and you meet your future husband,
like how did you end up in California then?
(03:27):
Cause you were in Texas and then was it school
or something?
Well, my husband, I mean, my father worked
in the Titan missile silos.
Really?
Yeah.
So just explain a bit of what that is,
just for reference.
It was some kind of a missile that would shoot up
and go over, I guess, and
(03:49):
bomb overseas or something.
But they were very, very deep in the ground,
had these really over a
hundred foot, maybe 200 foot,
I'm not sure, elevators.
And my father was an
engineer, aeronautical space engineer.
And so he was working on
this Titan missile in Arkansas
for Jacksonville Air Force Base.
(04:10):
And he was a civilian
doing it, though, contractor.
And he was in an elevator accident.
And the elevator dropped several hundred feet
with him in it.
And he injured his back
and was laid up for a while.
And so he decided he had to
find another place to work.
(04:33):
And so he heard, you know, California,
everybody goes to
California to make a lot of money.
And so we moved to California
and I was in my second year in high school.
So he started working for
different aircraft companies
out there and ended up
working for Hughes Aircraft,
which now is Raytheon.
(04:54):
Okay, so this is, which part of California?
Where are you living at this?
Southern California, Los Angeles area.
West Chester is where I went to school
and where we lived, the suburb of Los Angeles,
near the beach.
What if you said this was
a pretty patriotic family
that you were a part of, you know,
(05:16):
God and country kind of situation?
It means your father's
working on Titan missile systems.
Or was it just, this is just kind of a job
and this is just life?
Well, he had even worked on
one of the space shuttles,
the Gemini space shuttle.
So yeah, I would say he was somewhat patriotic.
We said the pledge of allegiance stood up
(05:38):
when the flag went by and all of that, but.
That's fascinating.
It's actually really fascinating.
Yeah, space travel is something that intrigues me
and airplanes, things like that,
which segues nicely into
this next part of your life
where you meet your future husband.
And well, yeah, just
(05:59):
start talking us through that
because that part of the story continues here.
Well, I liked school.
And so I had signed up for a summer school class
in my high school.
And this, it was a literature class.
And that's where I met Vince.
And it was not,
(06:21):
I was actually had another boyfriend at the time.
And Vince had said something to me
as I was walking out a door,
which I felt was inappropriate.
So I didn't like him at all.
And so that was the last time I saw him
after that class was over until the next year
(06:43):
when a friend of mine was visiting
and her mother had said she could go out
with her boyfriend that was from the area,
but that I needed to go with them.
And I had just broken up with somebody.
And so I had no date.
So it would have been a threesome.
And I think that her boyfriend was like,
he wasn't comfortable with that.
And so he brought along a blind date
(07:04):
and it turned out to be Vince.
And when he walked in the door,
I said to my mother, I'm not going.
My mother said, yeah, you
are, you gave your word.
And so I thought, okay, I'll
make it really rough on him.
And so I didn't talk much.
And I tried to order the most
expensive thing on the menu.
(07:27):
And he came back the next day
and still was talking to me.
So, and then a couple of days later,
he asked me to go steady and
I'm just like, I don't know.
I wasn't really interested
in having just one boyfriend
at that time, but I
thought, okay, we can do that.
I was kind of dating other boyfriends
(07:49):
because I didn't want to be
in a relationship and get hurt.
So, but he seemed like a nice guy.
So I thought, okay.
So that continues for a little while.
Vince, your husband then
had interest in the Air Force.
And so that kind of brings us
back around to the aeronautics
(08:10):
and aviation side of things
that we were just talking about.
So when did you all get
married then in this process?
Was this before he joined the Air Force?
Yes, well, it was, I was still in high school
and he came to my senior prom and everything.
And he was already in
(08:30):
college and we got married in 1968
and just in between his junior and senior year.
And he had just came out of
bootcamp for the Air Force,
junior bootcamp or something.
It wasn't full fledged bootcamp.
(08:50):
I think it was ROTC bootcamp.
And so they had shaved his
head just before our wedding.
And so in the pictures, see
this guy with almost bald.
So, but yeah, so then we got married
and I worked full time
and went to school part time
and he would school full
(09:10):
time and worked part time.
So we had a very busy life.
And then we found out we
were gonna have our first child
right away, which was a surprise.
And he got out of the Air Force
and we went to Phoenix,
Arizona for pilot training,
which was, and we only had one car.
(09:34):
And so I got left home a lot.
But it was a nice place to
live and he worked very hard,
learning a lot.
But those must have been, you know,
difficult times in a way.
I mean, you know, if he's
going through flight training,
that's pretty rigorous,
(09:55):
you know, in the Air Force
and you're newly married, you've moved.
Yeah, they just paint a bit of a picture.
Like what was life like as a military wife?
And yeah, what was life like for you?
Well, the first year was very lonely
because he was gone sometimes 12 hours.
(10:17):
He would be, you know, grueling.
And I knew it was hard on him,
but I was also alone.
I had no friends.
My family wasn't there and I had a new baby.
And since I was an only child,
I didn't know how to take
care of a baby very well.
And so that was interesting,
(10:37):
but and only having one car,
so I could only go shopping,
you know, every week or two,
because the base was about a half an hour away.
And so he needed the car to go to work every day.
And so it was very, very
lonely and very kind of sad
(11:01):
from time to time, you know,
that I didn't really have any,
probably about six months
in, we made some friends
from some of the neighbors
that were also in pilot training.
So I knew their wives, but still, you know,
some of the other wives didn't have babies yet,
or they had more than one baby,
(11:23):
or, you know, they were more experienced.
And so we just kind of went day to day.
Yeah, so this is probably one of those things
where like marriage is
difficult at this point, right?
I mean, because again, like flight school,
the Air Force, like these are big career things
(11:44):
for your husband that I'm
sure takes so much time.
And then at some point in
here, he's deployed as well.
After he finished flight
school, then he went overseas
and I moved back to
California to be near my parents
so that I could get help with my daughter.
And I thought I'd go back to school.
So his mother had a daycare in her home.
(12:06):
And so she watched our daughter during the day
while I went back to school.
And after a while I decided we had some bills
and so I would go ahead and get a job.
And then so I was working
and trying to take care of her.
And then in that time,
(12:27):
she started having seizures.
So that took a lot of my time and energy
and trying to take care of
why she was having seizures
and making changes in our lifestyle and diet.
And everything to try and
figure out what was going on.
And this is all while Vince is out of the country
(12:47):
at war essentially.
And so all of my attention then was on,
just basically trying to
take care of our daughter
and see what was best for her.
And also try to pay off our bills.
We had a car payment and then because of,
(13:08):
because my father was not as
kind to me or to my daughter,
I couldn't live at home with them.
So I then had a rent payment to an apartment
and then you have bills,
electric bill, phone bill,
all of that.
So it was kind of a very
(13:30):
busy time then for me too.
So somewhere in this process,
you're not quite sure about this marriage thing.
Do you want to talk about that?
Yeah, before he went overseas,
because I'd felt so invisible
when he was in pilot training,
I just told him, I'm not sure about this.
So let's kind of take a break.
(13:51):
And so when he left and then
I got busy with our daughter
and all, I just kind of focused on that.
And, but then probably a little more than halfway
through that overseas tour that he had,
they had something called RnR, a Rest
and Relaxation, a Rest and Refreshment.
(14:15):
They sent us to Hawaii,
which is where we had had our honeymoon.
And so I said, yeah, I'll
go meet you there in Hawaii.
And so we kind of rekindled
because both of us were away from everything
and it was relaxing.
And so I thought, oh, okay,
maybe we can make this work.
So he came straight there from deployment.
(14:36):
Right.
So which that's a separate interview we did
with your husband then
how he was flying missions,
surveillance missions based out of Thailand
during the Vietnam war.
So flying into Vietnam and things.
Okay, so he comes straight from there.
Y'all are in Hawaii now.
Okay, so you got that part of life.
And then I'm guessing at some point,
(14:57):
military is like, okay, RnR is over.
You're reassigned to somewhere else.
No, he went back then overseas
and I went back to California.
And then at the end of that tour,
then he was assigned to B-52s.
And so he was, we went to Merced, California
for his training there.
(15:17):
And so I went with him to that.
And then from there, he was
assigned to upstate New York.
And so I went with him to upstate New York.
That's the whole way across the country.
Yeah.
It's a big move.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so we got up to New York and got settled in.
And then he got busy again,
(15:39):
being an Air Force officer and a pilot
and learning a new plane
and concentrating on being
the best he could in his career.
Very goal oriented and very career minded.
And so in time again,
I felt like he'd forgotten us.
(16:00):
And then he started having assignments to Guam.
And then we, I became a
with child with our second child.
And he was in Guam
about the time that I was going to deliver.
So I had flown back to
(16:21):
California to be with my parents
when I had the baby so
that his mom could help out
with our daughter and I could have our baby.
And I remember having our second child
and looking at the clock and realizing
that my husband was in Cambodia,
flying over Cambodia dropping bombs.
And I'm in this nice clean hospital,
(16:43):
giving birth to a baby.
And somebody else could be,
their babies could be dying.
You thought that.
And I think that's one of the pieces
that is pretty easy for us
to not really have our heads
(17:03):
around is all the separation and just the,
all the moving around too that's happening.
And this must've been disorienting perhaps,
or I don't even know the right word
because I haven't
experienced something like this.
Since my parents moved around so much,
to me it was just normal
life moving from place to place.
(17:24):
I know a lot of people ask me,
how do you handle that?
But it was like, that was the life
I had already experienced growing up
with my parents moving around so much.
My dad was one time at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
And by the time my mother and I got there
and they had just had a new house,
(17:44):
they moved into brand new built.
We were there two months
and he got transferred somewhere else.
And so it was kind of disorienting
going back to another place.
Is a sense of like, you
can't really settle necessarily.
Right.
(18:05):
So I just, I never lived anywhere until
we moved back to Ohio.
Well, when we moved to Ohio the first time,
was the first time I had ever lived anywhere
within a couple of years.
So you're in California for a
time with your second child.
(18:26):
Again, your husband is flying combat missions
in the Vietnam War again.
So multiple, it sounds like he
was over there multiple times.
Yeah, for a couple months at a time
or three months at a time.
And so then I, after having that baby,
I went back to New York,
went back to the military lifestyle
(18:48):
of just raising my children
and paying attention to them
because he was working so hard on his job.
And this is, so he gets back
and he'd be back at the
same base there in New York.
Right.
Right, so.
Yeah, in New York.
How long did that last before it was,
you started being like,
"I'm not sure this is working."
Probably about another year.
(19:10):
And then I started thinking,
"Something's got to change here."
And so I started searching
and talking to different people
and asking questions and everything.
And after about seven years of marriage,
I went in, decided,
I just,
(19:30):
my dad was not an easy person to live with.
And I always, growing up, always thought,
"Why does my mother stay with him?
He's abusive and why are we staying here?"
And I thought, if I ever get married,
I'm never gonna let this happen to my children.
And so I was just, in the back of my mind,
(19:52):
I was afraid that I would have a marriage
similar to that someday.
And so even though he was more ignoring us,
not intentionally, it just came out that way.
And I just thought, "I
don't wanna live like this.
I want somebody that,
I picked him because I
(20:12):
thought he would be a good father
and a good provider," which
he was an excellent provider,
but he wasn't there as a
husband or a father most of the time.
And so I thought, "Okay, I
think we need another separation."
So I was going to a lawyer
to get a legal separation
and the lawyer explained,
"It's cheaper to get a divorce."
And I didn't wanna cost too much money
(20:35):
and I didn't want to create a problem.
So I said, "Okay, we'll
just go for the divorce then."
And so I did, I filed for divorce
and I had to come up with 10 reasons
at that time in New York.
The lawyer said, "These
are pretty flimsy reasons."
And I said, "Well, I don't
wanna hurt his reputation
or I don't wanna make
people think bad about him."
(20:56):
And so he said, "Okay, we'll go with this."
And so when we filed for divorce
and I had him served with
papers while he was on alert
because I didn't know his reaction
because my father was an angry person,
but Vince wasn't, but I
didn't know how he would react.
When you say he was on alert,
what does that mean exactly?
(21:16):
That means that he was away from,
he was in this facility
underground there on the base.
He could not go away from that facility
except to the grocery store on
base or to the store on base,
but he couldn't come home for a week at a time.
He had to stay there ready to,
in case we had to go to nuclear war,
(21:38):
he could jump in his plane and take off.
Oh, wow.
Okay, so he's locked, I mean,
I guess the word like kind of locked in on base,
like, "Okay, I'm on for seven full days."
So, wow.
So he's getting the papers for divorce there,
like on base like that.
Right. Wow.
(22:00):
Yeah, and so he got the papers and he called me
and he said, "I didn't know we had any problems."
I'm just like, "Really?"
But then the court case came and I just,
it was as though something was pushing me
once I made that decision to file for papers.
(22:23):
It was like something
just pushing me towards that
and we even talked about it and he said,
"You know, do you really
have to do it at the time?"
"Yeah, yeah."
And so he didn't even show up at the court
and the judge even looked at me and said,
"Well, these are pretty soft reasons."
(22:47):
And my lawyer said, "Well, yeah."
And the judge just said,
"She wants to take her
children to go back to California."
And my lawyer said, "Well,
that's where her parents are.
That's where she can- she has no friends or family here."
And the judge said, "Is
that okay with her husband?"
And the lawyer said,
"Yeah, he isn't contesting it."
(23:08):
And so the judge said, "Okay."
And he slams the gavel down.
And it was like, kind of
like an explosion in my ears.
I thought, "That's it?"
He said, "Grant it."
And all of a sudden this pressure that was on me
to get this done and you have to do this,
it was gone and I was just confused.
(23:30):
Then what have I done?
And then as we were walking out,
I said to my lawyer, "What do I have to do now?
Is there a waiting period?"
He said, "Nope, nope, it's all over.
You can go down the hall
and marry somebody else now."
I thought, "How cold and how heartless?"
And it just seemed strange.
(23:53):
I was just like so vulnerable at that time
that had Vince been there,
I probably would have said,
"Oh, let's call this whole thing off.
This is silly."
But he wasn't, he didn't know.
And so then I went home and I was already
in a separate bedroom and everything
(24:14):
and just started getting
ready to pack for movers to come
to move me to California,
which my father was gonna pay for.
And Vince even appealed when the movers got there
to me to stay.
But once I had made this, called the movers
and set everything up,
there came that pressure again.
(24:36):
You have to do this.
You said, "You're gonna do this.
You gotta go through with this."
And it was as though, almost as though the enemy
was just pushing me, like a demonic force on me
to get this done.
You need this.
(24:56):
And so I don't think, if somebody had offered me
a hundred thousand dollars even at that moment,
there was this pressure, I had to do this.
And so then driving in a little Mustang
with two children in a
car by myself to California.
From New York.
So that's like over what,
2000 miles or something?
(25:17):
Yeah, took me several days.
Plus I had car trouble along the way.
And everything, and on the way I'm just like,
what have I done?
Well, yeah, that's kind
of what I'm wanting to dig
into that a little actually.
It's so- you've left your husband,
you're moving like all the way across the country
from New York all the way
(25:38):
to, back to LA, I guess,
Los Angeles.
Right, that's where my parents were at the time.
And you're essentially starting a new life.
That must've been really difficult.
Tell me, yeah, like talk to
me about that new chapter,
I guess, a new phase of
your life going through that.
My parents had a vacant
(25:58):
house that they owned next door
to them that hadn't been rented in years.
And so my father said,
I'll give you a reduced rent
if you will clean it up,
clean up the yard and everything.
And so we moved in there.
And then I decided I'll
try and go back to school,
but with that didn't last very long
(26:19):
because I couldn't really
afford food for the children
or all of the utilities it took and pay him rent.
And he was very firm on it.
He says, I'm giving you reduced rent.
You know what I'm thinking?
So after a while, I just was on my way home
(26:39):
from school one day.
I thought, what am I gonna do?
And I saw this bookstore and I went in
and I had never heard of a
Christian bookstore in my life.
And evidently it was a Christian bookstore,
but I didn't know that, I just saw books.
And so I was looking on books about divorce
and what do I do now and all that.
(27:00):
And this young girl came up to me
and she asked to help me and I said, no.
And I tried to put down the book behind me
so she couldn't see what I was looking at
because I was embarrassed.
And she said, "Well, you new in town?"
And I said, "No, I went to high school here
and, but kind of new back in town."
(27:21):
And so she said, "Well, do you have a church?"
And I thought, well, I had converted to Catholic
to marry Vince.
And so as a divorced, I could
no longer take the sacraments.
So I needed a new church.
Okay, so that's, okay.
So you would have been converted to Catholic
(27:41):
and then since the divorce, that's like,
this would have been-
No, I converted to Catholic to marry him.
To marry him. And then because of the divorce though,
now you can't take the sacraments.
You can't take the sacraments at church because-
I didn't think of that.
And so I thought, well, I need a new church.
And so she says, Well, why
don't you come to our church?"
She jotted it down and gave me the card.
(28:03):
And so I stuck it in my pocket and I said,
well, I'll see, I'll think about it.
And it took me a couple of
weeks to get up enough nerve
to go to visit their church by myself.
And everybody was so nice
and just kind of accepted me in
everything and I thought, this is interesting.
And so I went for a couple of weeks
and then I took my children,
(28:23):
which they thought were my
little brother and sister.
And I said, no, these are my children.
And they put me in the youth group
because I was still going to school.
That was where I really needed to be
because young people are honest.
They don't pull punches with God or with others.
If they see a problem, they tell you.
(28:45):
If they believe something, they believe it
or they question it.
And so I'm hearing all
these people talking about,
they prayed about a test or they prayed about
their relationship with their parents.
And then they come back
the next week to youth group.
They say, all these answers they got.
I'm thinking, God doesn't
care about these little things.
(29:06):
What do you, you know,
grow up and just deal with it.
But they, after a while, I thought, you know,
I had a test in school too.
So I thought, okay, I'll pray.
And I did better on the test.
I relaxed and everything.
And then I thought, they have
something I don't have though.
(29:28):
Just because God answered one prayer,
I still didn't know him.
And they had asked me, are you a Christian?
I said, well, I'm an American.
Of course, I'm a Christian.
Oh, what an interesting response.
I live in America.
Yeah, yeah.
Because it's just like, you were raised with this
(29:48):
and you kind of went to church sometimes.
I just assumed I was a Christian
because I knew who Jesus was.
Yeah, yeah.
But I didn't really know him like they did.
And that became evident after a while.
Like when you responded that way.
I mean, yeah, like I'm an American.
They just said, okay.
You know, they were nice about it.
(30:08):
Yeah, they were probably being like,
we might need to talk about this again, right?
So they just kind of let me go and they figured,
she'll figure it out.
Which I did as I saw the other young people
were saying different things
that the Lord had done for them.
And I thought, I could really use some help
because I was starting to,
the rheumatoid arthritis
(30:29):
that I'd gotten at 14 that had become dormant
was starting to get bad again.
And I couldn't pay my bills.
And I thought, you know, if there's some way
that I can get some help somewhere
and I wasn't gonna tell anybody,
I was too prideful to tell anybody
about all the problems I was having.
(30:50):
So I thought, well, you know, if God can help,
I'll just ask.
And so I heard them praying in ways
that I hadn't thought of before.
I mean, I talked to God all the time, I thought,
but I didn't really expect an answer.
Oh, interesting.
And so I went to the youth pastor and said,
(31:13):
I think they have something I don't have.
And he said, well, tell me about it.
And so I told him, I said, they pray with meaning
and they expect answers.
And he said, don't you?
Well, yeah, sorta, but, you know.
And so he said, well, let's
take care of this right now.
And he says, do you have Jesus
(31:33):
as your personal Lord and Savior?
I just kinda looked at him, I said,
I don't know.
And he said, then you may not.
So anyway, he led me through the sinner's prayer
and said, you know, now pray and see.
And so it was different.
I went home and I opened up the Bible
(31:55):
and it was like a whole different book.
It was as though the Lord
gave me this extra feeling
that I needed.
And a few days later, they asked me
if I wanted to be baptized.
And so I said, "If- I've
been baptized as a Catholic."
and they said, "Well, you
(32:17):
weren't really a Christian though."
Okay, so then I agreed to
be baptized the next Sunday.
And so I did.
That's quite the story of those people.
I mean, I'm trying to think the right words here,
but it's like they gave you a chance in a way
(32:39):
or like welcomed you in without,
it doesn't sound like there
was just all this pressure
of like, you need to get saved,
but yet they lived out
something that you could see,
like, wait a minute,
something's not lining up
with what I thought I had.
You know, what I thought
I had actually isn't real.
I'm seeing something here.
(33:00):
Am I getting that about...?
Yeah, they weren't trying to witness to me
and knock me over with Scripture.
They just lived it out in front of me.
The other thing was when I came to them,
I was wearing short dresses, tight dresses,
and I noticed everybody around me,
they weren't dressed that way.
(33:21):
And so very quickly, I
started sewing up different dresses,
longer dresses, you know, looser dresses,
and everything so that I would fit in.
I wanted to be part of this group.
And, but they, one thing was they had told me,
well, they took me to a seminar for young people.
(33:42):
And every one of those seminars,
they say the exact same thing.
You have the same
notebook, they say the same thing.
But the Lord uses different things
as just as though you read a Scripture,
and one day you read it and the
Lord can speak to you this way
and another day you read
it and the Lord shows you
something different from that same scripture.
Well, that's what happened with this seminar.
(34:03):
The first one I went to, they, all I got from it
was forgiveness and honoring your parents.
And I was like, Lord, you have no idea
what my dad was like then.
Remember, I'm a new
Christian and I'm telling God,
you don't know what my dad was like.
You don't know what happened growing up.
You have no idea what I went through.
(34:24):
And, but I kept going, as
I looked at the Scriptures,
I kept coming to forgiveness.
And so I, that, okay, he had been abusive
towards both me and my children.
We're living next door to him.
And he had already been
abusive since we'd been back.
He had hurt my daughter and
(34:45):
had belted her with belts,
left stripes on her legs and everything.
And so I mustered up
enough strength to go next door
and ask him for forgiveness
from what I had been like growing up.
I said, I don't think my
attitude was always right.
(35:05):
And I probably displayed rebellion.
And I want to ask your forgiveness.
And my dad just looked at me
and I kind of stood between,
there was a kind of opening between the kitchen
and the living room.
And I stood on the other side of the wall
because I didn't know if he was going to punch me
or get mad or slap me or throw
(35:28):
his hot coffee at me or what.
But he just looked at me and I waited.
And finally he said, well, yeah,
you were a little difficult raising.
And I waited and then he says, yeah, okay.
And turned around and went on about his business.
And I thought, well, I'm
(35:48):
going to leave before he gets mad
or thinks of some reason
that I've done something.
But from that day on,
he never bothered me or my children again.
So I know that the Lord had
something to do with that.
Wow.
I mean, that must have been incredibly difficult
(36:08):
to ask forgiveness in a situation like that. It was
more scary than anything
because I didn't know how he was going to react
if he was going to, my dad's lips,
when he would get mad,
would get real flat and quiver.
And I just watched to see, is
he going to get upset with me?
(36:30):
And so I asked for forgiveness and then waited.
And then I left as quickly as I could
because I just didn't
know what he was going to do.
Wow.
Like this is showing though,
when you would have say first moved back,
like from when you leave Vince, your ex-husband
(36:50):
and you move back to California
before you become a Christian,
I'm guessing you would have
never done something like that.
No, because I was very bitter against him
for the things that he had
done to me and to my children.
And he was continuing already to bother me
(37:14):
and hurt my children.
And so I was very afraid of him.
He was a very big man.
So I just didn't know how he would handle it.
That's incredible.
That took a lot of courage, I think.
I think it was just the Lord was behind me.
Is there more on this
(37:36):
about restoring relationships?
You know, after you come to Christ
and learning some of these things
about forgiveness and restoration.
Yeah, is there more pieces to that, that you'd like to add into this?
Well, the next seminar
then about six months later,
three months later, the same seminar,
(37:57):
all I heard during that was
about Christian marriages.
And I thought, wow, that's really nice
if people have a marriage like that,
but mine wasn't like that.
It can't be; I'm not married.
Well, maybe if I got married to a Christian guy,
it would be like that.
So I'd talk to the youth by then.
They said, oh yeah, you can get married.
You came to us single.
(38:18):
So in Corinthians, it talks about as you come in,
that's how you are.
I think it's 1 Corinthians
7:19 or something like that.
And I believed that.
And I thought, well, that would be good.
So I went home to look in my Bible,
but everything I opened up to, it said,
(38:39):
if you have been divorced, you either stay single
or you get remarried.
I'm like, I don't like that Scripture.
You know, and I kept going
back and forth, back and forth.
And so that went on for several months.
Oh, wow.
Okay, so you wrestled with this one.
Oh yeah, yeah, because I wanted my children
to have a good life.
(39:01):
I just wanted, I thought Christian marriage
would be really nice, but how am I gonna do that?
And so I finally got enough
nerve to pray and ask God,
if you want me to get remarried,
then Vince needs to call me
(39:22):
and ask me to remarry him.
And the next night the phone rings.
Just like, no, no, no, we can't do this.
And I answered the phone and it's Vince.
And he says,
What do you think about getting remarried
or something like that?
I forget his exact words,
but it was just factual.
(39:43):
Just there.
Just like, this is the same person.
I said, well, call me back tomorrow night.
Cause I just heard at youth group,
Satan can appear as an angel of light.
And I thought, this is a deception.
He heard my prayer cause I had prayed out loud.
(40:03):
And so then I sat down by the side of the bed
and prayed this time I
was quiet about my prayers.
And I said--
You want to make sure it doesn't get hijacked.
-exactly.
And so I said, okay, God, if this is really you,
this time you have him
call me back with soft words,
emotion, something, talking in words
(40:25):
that he normally doesn't say,
and kind of woo me.
Like, I want to feel like
I'm really wanted for me,
not just because he needs
his next promotion or whatever.
And so, okay.
Cause he's never going to talk to me that way
(40:46):
over the phone, just won't happen.
Next night, phone rings
and I thought, uh-huh, sure.
And I answered the phone and I'm just like,
who is this guy on the other hand?
It didn't sound like him, his voice was soft
and it was soothing.
And he said, you know, I love you.
And he was giving me all the good words.
(41:07):
And I thought, wait a minute,
Satan's probably somehow knew
that I was going to do this.
So I said, okay, I still need to think this over.
So I'll call you back.
So for five days I fasted.
Oh, wow.
Totally fast, water only.
Because I just was sure that God-
(41:29):
And I told God, I said, you
don't know what I went through.
I don't want a marriage like my parents.
I want a good marriage.
I want a Christian marriage like I heard about.
I want this and I want that.
And he smokes and he drinks.
And there's all these other
things that I kept telling,
it's as though God didn't know all this already,
but I'm a new Christian.
And I thought, God oughta hear all this stuff
(41:51):
that's bothering me.
So was Vince a Christian at this point then?
I'm sorry, yes.
Actually he had come to visit us.
I'm sorry, he had come to visit us
and had attended church with us
because our oldest daughter had asked
that she wanted to show
him to her Sunday School's
(42:12):
And he had actually prayed a
sinner's prayer with a deacon.
And when he told me, I'm just like, uh-huh, sure.
You're telling me a Catholic became a Christian
because he was a dyed in the wool Catholic type.
But it really sunk.
And I gave him a Bible and he
had been reading this Bible.
(42:33):
And I'd been telling him
about all of the miracles
that God had been doing in
our lives throughout the year.
Somebody coming in and paying for the gas
to be turned on in our house
because I didn't have the money.
Nobody owned up to it.
We were out of food.
And so I prayed with the children.
(42:54):
And the next morning I opened
the door to take them to school
and take my daughter to school
and my son to the sitter in major school.
And there was four bags of
groceries sitting on our front porch.
Do you know how that happened?
No.
Oh, that's amazing. Nobody owned up to it.
Wow, like what was this
(43:15):
40 years ago or something?
Somebody did that and they probably have no idea.
I mean, they probably never found out
like how big of an impact things like that have.
Oh, that's incredible.
But even, and I told Vince about it and he said,
"Well, you probably told somebody
that you were out of food."
I said, "I don't think so.
I may have said something,
(43:35):
but I didn't detail what I needed."
And Angela had said, "I want some chips.
I want to make some cookies, mom."
And I said, "Uh, we don't have any flour.
We don't have any sugar right now.
We just have the basics."
And in the bag was flour, sugar, chocolate chips,
(43:56):
potato chips, some cereal, all the things.
So this is happening.
Oh man, there's a lot of
things coming together here
where so much of your life
as you're like starting a new life
in Los Angeles and divorced
and all these things and
then finding Christianity.
(44:18):
And then those moments where God answers prayer,
like that must have been, I
don't know, earth shattering
is the word that comes to mind,
but just like overwhelming of like,
"Whoa, this is a new life."
Or like, "This is a different
life than what you expected."
It showed me, for a new Christian,
it showed me that prayer really works
and that God really cares
(44:39):
about our everyday things.
So it was even more than the little tests
that people were praying about.
These were, to me, it meant food for my children
and for me and warmth over the winter.
And I had started Bible
school there at the church.
(44:59):
They had, several of the youth
were going to Bible school at night.
And so I thought, "I'll go too,
because I need to learn more about the Bible."
And we were studying the Pentateuch,
the first five books of the Bible.
And I saw in there about their eating habits.
And I was very, very sore
with rheumatoid arthritis
(45:19):
and was told that I would be
in a wheelchair by Thanksgiving
and probably in the hospital by Christmas.
And this was the end of September.
And this would have been in like,
in the mid 1970s or something.
1975.
Well, I saw you walking earlier today.
So I'm assuming that didn't happen.
(45:40):
Right.
So you want to tell me about that?
So I decided I would try as close as I could
doing a diet more similar to
what God had told the Israelites.
This is my favorite foods
since I was a southerner
where cornbread and beans and you put ham in them
(46:01):
and shrimp, crawfish, shrimp, catfish.
And I had to cut all those out.
I mean, I didn't have to, but I chose to do that
to see if it would work.
And so the next time I went to the doctor
towards the end of
October, beginning of November,
I had been on this for over three weeks.
(46:23):
And the doctor said, "You should have been
hurting more by now."
I said, "No, actually I'm
really starting to feel better.
I am in less pain."
He says, "Well, it's getting colder.
So you're going to get worse."
But I didn't, I kept getting
better and better and better.
And Christmas time, I was down on the floor
(46:45):
and up again with the children.
To this day, I do not eat any catfish, shrimp,
any shellfish, any pork products.
And when I have accidentally gotten some pork,
I do have some stiffness and pain in joints.
That's wild.
That is so wild.
(47:07):
I'm guessing that the doctor was really confused.
Yeah.
Years later, my mother got arthritis
and I told her, I said, "Go off of ham."
And she's like, "I can't do that."
I said, "Yeah, you can."
And so we went to the doctor and the doctor said,
"Okay, no more white
flour, no white sugar, no pork,
(47:32):
and reduce your red meat."
And I think that there was something else.
And my mother just looked at her and said,
"What am I supposed to eat?"
But when she would stay off of pork herself,
she started feeling better too.
It's different for different people,
but it definitely worked for us.
(47:55):
What's getting me here is, you're just reading,
you're doing some Bible studies
on the first five books of the Bible,
like the Law, the Pentateuch, whatever Torah,
whatever you wanna call it.
And you're just picking
that up as a new Christian
and saying, "Oh, well, hey, let me try it."
That simple faith or that
(48:17):
just pretty straightforward of,
I see this in scripture, maybe this would help.
That's kind of, there's
something pretty neat about that.
So all this is going on,
man, yeah, there's a lot here.
And so Vince has come out and visited.
You gave him a Bible, I think he said, right?
(48:38):
You've been reading the Bible.
So that gets us up to these phone calls
that you're exchanging and then he's saying,
"Well, should we get married again?" basically.
So yeah, walk me through that now.
So after five days of fasting, at the youth group,
they talked about faith and they said,
(49:01):
"Real faith is like walking past a pool
and seeing there's water in it,
climbing up to the high dive,
getting out to the end of the diving board
and looking down and
there's no water in the pool,
but God's told you to jump
and he'll take care of it.
When you get there, there'll be water."
(49:22):
And I thought, that's what this feels like.
And I felt like, okay, I'm
going to have faith in God
that he's behind all this.
And so I called Vince back and I said,
"Yeah, I guess I'll remarry you."
And so he came out and I set
(49:43):
up this wedding very quickly
and it was a real time wedding
compared to the first one, which was a big thing
and asked my dad, well,
Vince had actually called my dad
this time and said, "I'd
like to marry Charlette again."
And my dad said, "You didn't ask the first time."
(50:06):
And Vince said, "Well, I'm
trying to do it right this time."
My dad said, "Well, okay, but you're gonna have
to pay me back what I spent
bringing her out here."
And Vince said, "Okay."
And he had some money in the bank, so he did.
He paid my dad back.
And so I asked my dad to
walk me down the aisle again
and he said, "Okay."
And so at the back of the church though,
(50:27):
before we walked down the aisle, he says,
"My car's just outside.
I have the keys right here.
You couldn't back out of the first one
because he said I had too much money in it,
but you can back out of this one.
I'll pay you back if you want
to back out of this wedding."
I said, "No, this is what God wants me to do."
And he wasn't too happy
(50:49):
about that, but he said, "Okay."
So we walked down the aisle.
And even when I got up
there and I looked at Vince,
I thought, "Oh, am I really doing this again?
Okay, God, you're gonna have to do something
because I don't really feel love at this point.
I don't hate him.
I like him.
(51:10):
He's a nice person, but I
would like to have love."
And so we said our vows.
And when I said I do,
it was as though God dropped this veil over me.
And I just felt love beyond
what I'd ever felt before.
And I thought, "Wow, I got it. I got it."
(51:30):
And we walked out and then
we went to the same seminar,
that I'd been to, for our honeymoon.
And this veil of love only lasted three days
and then it was gone.
And I was like, "What happened?"
But in the Bible we read that it says
that the older women are
to teach the younger women
to love their husbands.
(51:52):
So if it can be taught, it can be learned.
And so as I read my Bible,
I learned about God's love and how to apply it.
And God is constantly teaching us
and we're constantly learning.
And so I learned through the Lord how to love.
And so we have love now and God gave us the love.
(52:16):
But at the seminar, Vince is sitting there
with his arms crossed, like he's bored.
He's kind of being nice
about listening and everything,
but just kind of bored.
And on the fourth night, all
of a sudden he leans forward
and he goes, "You know what? This will work.
This will work. This will really work."
And I said, "What are you talking about?
This is God's word."
And he goes, "No, no, no. The Air Force uses it."
(52:38):
And I'm like, "No, this is God's word."
And he says, "No, no, this will work."
He says, "This memorizing
and putting it into action
and knowing all of it."
He says, "That's it. I've been looking for a plan
and that's it. The Bible has
a plan for us, for our lives."
And I'm like, "Yeah."
Forgetting that he never had a Bible growing up.
(53:00):
I mean, I had Bibles and I read them
and I memorized S cripture growing up,
but it never meant anything to me.
It was just there.
And now we knew.
And so he just got excited
and just took off with it.
You know, there's, I think
there's some analogies here,
you know, how in the Air Force,
(53:22):
say I'm sure you'd have like those flight manuals
or something.
I wonder if there's some connections happening
in the brain for him.
That's what he said.
Oh really?
Yeah, that's what he said.
It's just like the Air Force.
Yeah, this is the flight manual that like,
instead of a flight manual, it's a life manual.
How about that?
He just caught on and just ran with it.
He's always been the kind that,
(53:43):
when he catches on something,
he locks on and it's over.
He just goes.
This is incredible.
You know, if, say in the weeks leading up to you
filing that divorce paperwork,
if you could have seen
like all the different things
that were gonna happen in
your life in the coming years,
because a lot of this,
this all happens in a
relatively short period of time,
(54:04):
does it not?
Couple years.
Yeah.
You know, that's just incredible.
Like how much transformation,
reconciliation is the big
word that's coming to my mind.
The forgiveness that you were describing earlier,
the restoring of relationships,
has some, that's potent stuff right there.
(54:25):
So you would have moved back then with him
back to New York then?
Right.
So tell me about,
you're back in New York,
your husband continues on as
an officer in the Air Force,
but now things are a little different, right?
I mean, this Christian thing is real now.
(54:46):
I'm guessing there were a
lot of lifestyle things,
habits, ways you did stuff
that like, wait a minute,
maybe we should make some changes here.
Tell me about some of those.
Well, he was used to going
to the bar on Friday nights
and debriefing, they sometimes called it,
but drinking and getting with all the guys
(55:08):
and talking and everything.
And so he asked me,
I want you to go with me.
And I'm just like,
this is not where a Christian woman should be.
And I prayed about it.
I just felt like the Lord saying, just go,
support your husband.
So we set up to the bar,
on bar stools up to the bar,
and somebody would come and say,
(55:29):
oh, I haven't seen you in ages.
Where have you been?
And I said, oh, well,
this is what happened to me.
And I started telling them about getting saved.
And I said, do you know the Lord?
And they very quickly said,
oh, I think I need to do something else.
And they would leave.
And this happened two or three,
maybe four weeks that we
would go on Friday night.
And I had told him about a
(55:50):
Bible study on Friday night.
And he said, but we can't go
because we go to the bar on Friday night.
But one night he says, you know what?
Nobody seems to talk to us at the bar anymore.
I said, well, I don't know.
I talk to anybody that comes up and talks to me.
I didn't tell him what I was saying.
But he said, so why don't
(56:10):
we try that Bible study?
Oh, really?
So that's, wow, what a change there.
And so he says, but
there's fighter pilots at that.
And he says, bomber pilots and fighter pilots
don't necessarily get along.
And I said, well, you know,
as Christians, maybe they do.
So we went and he just really,
they just took us in like we
(56:31):
were on the same level as them.
There wasn't any animosity,
fighter/bomber animosity.
And there were farmers
there too, you know, which-
How about that?
It was just, everybody was on the same level.
We were all fairly new
Christians and seeking the word
and just having a Bible study,
(56:51):
learning what God was showing us.
And he just, again,
enjoyed it and took off with it.
Yeah, were there other things that you changed
as the years go by?
I'm sure not everything
just magically poof, you know,
gets fixed all in one fell swoop.
You know, I'm sure this is a process here.
(57:13):
Well, then he, like the
majority of non-Christian men
had a stack of pornography underneath the bed
and it was still there when we got remarried.
And so every time I made the bed,
I just slipped my hand
down there and touched and said,
Lord, you know, this shouldn't be here,
but I'm not gonna tell him,
(57:34):
I want you to work with him on this
because I'd been reading books on,
"Put your husband first and to be submissive
and to be kind and not to
try to preach to the husband."
You know, and so I thought, okay, Lord,
you've got this and so,
(57:55):
and then I'd walk by the liquor cabinet
and put my hand up there and say,
Lord, this needs to be gone too.
You know, this is not what I
expect in a Christian home.
And so I came home from the commissary,
which is a grocery store on base one day
and he's out in the backyard with barbecue
and he's got these
magazines and he's burning them.
(58:17):
And I waited till the very last one was on fire
and I went out there and I said, what you doing?
He goes, well, I just had this feeling
that God didn't want me to have these around.
Like, really?
Okay, that's really good.
That's really, really good.
And so a few weeks later, again, I came home
(58:39):
and he's in the kitchen
pouring out the bottles of liquor
into the sink and I again waited
until the last drop was
poured out of the last bottle.
And I walked over and I said,
we have a crew party Friday night.
I'll just make some punch.
And he just, the look on his face,
he looked at me like, oh my goodness,
what are we gonna do?
I said, now, you know,
(59:00):
you're the aircraft commander.
You're the head guy.
Nobody's gonna question you.
And he's like, umm... and I said, no, no,
let's try it.
And so we had this table and had some punch on it
and all the goodies out there.
And you saw people looking at their drink,
at their punch and kind of sniffing it
and going to where they knew the liquor was kept,
(59:21):
opening the cabinet, it was empty, going back,
but nobody ever said a word.
So this was like a, just like
you had the flight crew over.
So this is the guys he
flies with basically, right?
For the B-52, that he commanded.
The six guys that flew under- with him.
Yeah, okay, so.
And their wives.
That must have been hard in a way though, right?
(59:43):
Cause you're kind of going out on a limb
with these people that you work with, you know,
and I don't know, I can imagine that,
but that would have been a little hard, right?
He was more worried than I was.
I was just like, we're gonna do this.
You know, God's gonna take care of it.
That's funny, that's funny.
Cause they're just like, why is there,
there's no alcohol in this punch?
(01:00:05):
It was more courage for him
than it was for me, you know,
because he's the big macho guy
and the aircraft commander and.
And the aircraft commander is
not serving, you know, alcohol.
Yeah, is he gonna look wimpy or something?
Wow, but that's, there's
something to that though,
where it's not just, you say a prayer
and move on with your life.
(01:00:25):
Like there's things that have to change here.
And I can imagine, again, I'm guessing
this is a long process, right?
You know, this doesn't happen right away.
It was over weeks, but it was in the first year
that we were remarried.
It was in the first year, but
it didn't all happen at once.
It was several weeks in between,
(01:00:46):
but the Lord was working
and just bringing us along
at the speed that the Lord
knew that we could handle,
as if we'd known in the beginning,
everything we were gonna go through.
I don't know that we would have signed on.
It's too much too quick,
you know, it's almost done.
Yeah, yeah.
So that gets us a little closer to today,
(01:01:09):
but we're not quite there yet.
Somewhere in that process,
you go from being a military wife, you know,
you're very, obviously the Air Force
is your husband's career.
I mean, that's his world, you know,
for so much of y'all's marriage.
(01:01:29):
Well, yeah, basically up to this point,
that was what you all knew.
Where does that change start happening?
Because you're clearly, some
things have changed since then.
Talk me through that process.
We started trying to go to churches
that we felt like really knew the Lord.
We actually went through the Charismatic Church
(01:01:50):
and realized through a stillbirth that I had
that that was all emotion,
not real caring of people
and not, they were disrespectful to God.
I felt like after I
looked back on it at the time,
we felt like it was the way to go,
but there's people seeking in every denomination
(01:02:12):
that we went through.
There are true seekers that are really trying
to serve the Lord.
And then we went through other churches,
each time getting a little bit more conservative,
thinking these people are gonna be
really trying to serve the Lord.
And there were some in each church,
but probably not as a whole
as much as what we wanted.
(01:02:33):
And so we kept looking and looking.
And I was teaching bread classes.
We had moved back to Ohio the second time
and I had started teaching bread classes
and I didn't advertise
it, but I got a call one day
from German Baptist ladies
(01:02:53):
and they wanted to come and do a bread class.
And I said, sure.
So they came over and I noticed,
I think the first time they
came there was four of them.
And then they said, this is pretty good.
We're gonna come back, bring
our sisters, other sisters.
I thought, how big is their family?
I just assumed, they meant sister sisters.
And so they came back and they said,
(01:03:14):
well, how many can we bring?
And I said, well, if you bring your own chairs,
you could probably fit 30 or 40 ladies in here,
but however many, we only have so much seating.
And so they came back with, I don't know,
at least 15 ladies, maybe more.
And they were all dressed
in the same style of dress,
(01:03:35):
different colors, same style of cap.
And they all had glowing faces and they acted
like they were just happy as could be
and they talked with each other.
And the feeling of
camaraderie or family was so strong
and they just seemed like they knew
(01:03:57):
where they were going and everything.
And so I said to one of them,
I think I'm gonna be one of you someday.
This was probably the
staunchest lady in the whole group.
And she just looked at me and Vince was just off
of active duty, but still working
for the government at that time.
And she just looked at me and
(01:04:17):
she said, well, that's nice.
She didn't say no, can't do it,
but she just said, that's nice.
And then about a month later,
some of the Millers had come to me.
They had a bakery in town, not too far from us
and asked me if I would bake for the store
because I ground my own wheat and did wheat bread
(01:04:39):
and rolls and everything.
And they said, can you come
and bring your wheat bread in
because we don't have any brown wheat bread.
So I did and I started asking questions
because they're all German Baptist in there.
Started asking pointed questions.
And finally I said, can I visit sometime?
(01:05:01):
And so Vince said, yeah, you
can visit when I'm out of town.
So I did, I started
visiting and that was back in 1993.
And so I visited from time to time all the way up
until 2010, we had been
going to another Baptist church
that we thought was even more conservative
(01:05:21):
for about four years, but it was turning out
it wasn't really where we wanted to be.
And I suggested to Vince,
why don't you come with me
to visit the German Baptist?
And he's like, ah, you
know, it's kind of different.
And he said, well, all right, I'll try.
And so he went and he says,
(01:05:42):
they had a dinner afterwards
and he looked around and he said,
I can see why you like these people.
They're just so welcoming and
everybody's just so friendly
and kind and so then we started going one Sunday
to the Baptist church and another Sunday
to the German Baptist and
after a while Vince said,
we have to make a decision here.
What are we gonna do?
And so he said, I said, well, he says,
(01:06:05):
I can't handle the non-resistance thing though
because we'd gone to a baptism and up until then
he was doing fine and then when he heard
they were non-resistant, he goes,
did you know they were non-resistant?
Did you know? Yeah.
You did, okay. And I said, yes,
I understand it.
Because I couldn't say I agree
(01:06:26):
because that would be usurping his authority.
So I just said, I understand it.
And he said like, well, how's that gonna work?
Because at this point, y'all had,
let's see, y'all had been in
the military for like 24 years.
And he was working back as a
contractor for the military.
Yeah, so you've been in
(01:06:46):
this world for a long time.
Like I can imagine this isn't just like a little,
you know, mental exercise of
thinking through non-resistance.
This is pretty significant for your lifestyle.
So I gave him books on non-resistance.
I gave him CDs on non-resistance.
He listened to all of them, but you know,
he's a very strong thinker.
(01:07:07):
And so he could pick out things and say,
well, you know, this
didn't quite answer the question
or this sidesteps this or that,
and he wasn't quite convinced.
And so I said, make your list.
And so he made a list of questions that he had
and they invited us to their annual conference.
So he went to the annual conference and he said,
you know, I'm tired of this.
We've got to get some answers.
(01:07:28):
And so he set it up that we were going to talk
to one of the ministers and he wasn't available.
So we talked to Todd Boone
and Todd sat on one side of the table
and we sat on the other side
and we were at Cedarville University
and behind Todd was this big pool.
And so as Todd opened the scriptures to Vince,
instead of hitting non-resistance,
(01:07:50):
he talked to him about two kingdoms.
We had never heard about two kingdoms.
We'd never heard that concept.
And so I watched Vince and as
he gathered the understanding,
it's just as though his face started gleaming.
And all of a sudden he said, I get it now.
There's water, let's go.
And Todd's like, no, you know,
(01:08:13):
there's some things we got to talk over first.
And so, because I'd been telling them all along,
if he catches it, he's going to run with it.
And everybody's saying, I don't know.
He's, you know, he seems
like a hard cookie to crack.
And I'm just like, no, I'm telling you, you know,
once he catches something and
he knows truth when he sees it.
(01:08:34):
And when he hears truth and he catches it,
he goes with it.
So he was ready.
And so then Cedarville
wouldn't let us be baptized there.
So the next Sunday we were baptized
into the German Baptist Church.
And that was in...
2011.
(01:08:56):
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Like what a story, you know,
there's been so many
different points along the way
leading up to where we sit right now.
And it's just kind of hard to even imagine
like all the dominoes in the chain, so to speak,
to get us here.
God is good.
Yeah, wow, isn't that something?
I'm still thinking back to
that doctor in, you know,
(01:09:17):
1975 or whatever that says,
you're gonna be in a
wheelchair by Christmas, you know?
And those people who took you in, you know,
in LA back then and
welcomed you into their church.
And then all these other
little points along the way
and the story that gets us here,
that's pretty incredible when you stop and think
all of that in one piece.
(01:09:37):
It's like, wow.
That just kind of proves if
we're really seeking the Lord
and we're reading His word
and we're listening to the word more so sometimes
than what people are telling us.
Because everybody has an opinion.
And sometimes, I mean, we're
learning still many things.
We don't have everything all together yet.
(01:09:59):
We're still learning a lot of things.
But as the Lord leads us and we're learning,
if we stick with His word,
we're gonna get there eventually.
And I mean, we're never gonna totally arrive
until we get to heaven.
But the Lord is good and brings us,
starts with where we are and just takes us along.
(01:10:23):
So there's probably a lot
of people listening to this
that are maybe struggling with what they feel
Christ is calling them to in their own lives.
And in your life, you've
been describing a lot of changes
and restoration and forgiveness
and yeah, a lot of different pieces there.
As you sought out, what is Christ calling you to.
(01:10:46):
So as we bring all this to a close,
the story to a close,
what would you say to encourage those people
that may be going through a similar situation
or going through challenging times right now?
You need to just keep searching Scripture
and comparing your life to the Scripture
and listening to the Lord
and seeking wisdom from those around.
(01:11:10):
And as I look back on some of
the churches that we went to,
how they twisted,
unfortunately, some of the Scriptures.
Don't always just take it
as what someone tells you,
compare the Scriptures with Scriptures
and know what the Lord's really saying
and what His word says.
(01:11:31):
Because then we may not be right
where He wants us at that
time, but He will bring us there.
But we have to keep our
eyes on the Lord, not on men.
Because the men around us,
the people around us can
fail us, but God won't fail.
God's there no matter what.
(01:11:54):
Even Moses made a mistake.
But he's still, and
David, we've all made mistakes,
but God is a God of mercy.
But if we keep our eyes on Him,
He can still bring us to where He wants us.
Powerful stuff.
Charlette, I really appreciate you
(01:12:14):
bringing your story to us today.
I feel like, yeah, it's been a privilege
to sit here and hear this and
to learn from your experience.
And yeah, I just thank you
for entrusting your story with us today.
Thanks for listening to
this episode with Charlette.
As she mentioned a few
times throughout this interview,
(01:12:34):
her husband Vince was going
through quite an experience
of his own through this whole process.
And we interviewed him as
well and got his testimony,
which you can find linked in
the description down below.
Thanks again for listening,
and we'll catch you in the next episode.
We're still learning a lot of things,
but as the Lord leads us and we're learning,
if we stick with His word,
we're gonna get there eventually.
And I mean, we're never gonna totally arrive
until we get to heaven, but you know,
the Lord is good and brings us,
starts with where we are and just takes us along.
(00:28):
Charlette, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for being willing to come on
and share your story today.
Thank you.
So let's start at the beginning.
And I know there's a lot of different angles
and pieces to your story and layers
and all kinds of stuff we're gonna get into,
but let's rewind and
start with where were you born
and were you raised in a religious family?
(00:49):
Tell me a little bit about your upbringing years.
I was born in Oklahoma.
My parents had been married several years
before they had me and they were
kind of a jack of all trades.
So they left me with my grandmother
while they figured out
what they wanted to do in life
until I was about four.
And she was a very godly lady.
(01:11):
She took me to church every Sunday
and all of the relatives were nearby.
And so we had Sunday dinners with everybody
and she gave me a lot of good Bible teaching
and I heard a lot.
But then when my parents had decided
what they were gonna do, we moved to Texas
and I never got to church again until I guess
(01:39):
when we would visit my grandmother
or until probably we moved to Arkansas
and I would ask somebody
would invite me to their church.
And I was in junior high in high school
and I would go with them.
And my mother was good about taking me
and dropping me off and Mother's Day and Easter,
(02:00):
she would go to church with me.
But other than that, it wasn't really much.
And so I was always seeking
how to come closer to the Lord
because I'd heard about him
but there was more head
knowledge than heart knowledge.
Just wanted to know this Jesus.
(02:22):
And so I was always kind of
listening to what everybody,
I mean, at one time I even had a Jewish friend.
She took me to the synagogue.
I said, "If Jesus was a Jew,
then I should become a Jew."
But when the rabbi asked me questions
and I said that Jesus was a Savior,
I kind of, he said, "That's not gonna work."
(02:45):
Oh, that's interesting.
What kind of church is it that your mother
was taking you to, you said
on Mother's Day and Easter?
Was there a certain denomination?
Mainly Baptist, because we were in the South.
Oh, sure.
And her mother was a
independent conservative Baptist.
So that was mainly where she would go.
(03:07):
But I tried Methodist and
Episcopalian and Presbyterian
and Baptist, different kinds
of Baptists and everything.
So at some point in this
story, though, you end up,
if I'm getting this
right, you end up in California
and you meet your future husband,
like how did you end up in California then?
(03:27):
Cause you were in Texas and then was it school
or something?
Well, my husband, I mean, my father worked
in the Titan missile silos.
Really?
Yeah.
So just explain a bit of what that is,
just for reference.
It was some kind of a missile that would shoot up
and go over, I guess, and
(03:49):
bomb overseas or something.
But they were very, very deep in the ground,
had these really over a
hundred foot, maybe 200 foot,
I'm not sure, elevators.
And my father was an
engineer, aeronautical space engineer.
And so he was working on
this Titan missile in Arkansas
for Jacksonville Air Force Base.
(04:10):
And he was a civilian
doing it, though, contractor.
And he was in an elevator accident.
And the elevator dropped several hundred feet
with him in it.
And he injured his back
and was laid up for a while.
And so he decided he had to
find another place to work.
(04:33):
And so he heard, you know, California,
everybody goes to
California to make a lot of money.
And so we moved to California
and I was in my second year in high school.
So he started working for
different aircraft companies
out there and ended up
working for Hughes Aircraft,
which now is Raytheon.
(04:54):
Okay, so this is, which part of California?
Where are you living at this?
Southern California, Los Angeles area.
West Chester is where I went to school
and where we lived, the suburb of Los Angeles,
near the beach.
What if you said this was
a pretty patriotic family
that you were a part of, you know,
(05:16):
God and country kind of situation?
It means your father's
working on Titan missile systems.
Or was it just, this is just kind of a job
and this is just life?
Well, he had even worked on
one of the space shuttles,
the Gemini space shuttle.
So yeah, I would say he was somewhat patriotic.
We said the pledge of allegiance stood up
(05:38):
when the flag went by and all of that, but.
That's fascinating.
It's actually really fascinating.
Yeah, space travel is something that intrigues me
and airplanes, things like that,
which segues nicely into
this next part of your life
where you meet your future husband.
And well, yeah, just
(05:59):
start talking us through that
because that part of the story continues here.
Well, I liked school.
And so I had signed up for a summer school class
in my high school.
And this, it was a literature class.
And that's where I met Vince.
And it was not,
(06:21):
I was actually had another boyfriend at the time.
And Vince had said something to me
as I was walking out a door,
which I felt was inappropriate.
So I didn't like him at all.
And so that was the last time I saw him
after that class was over until the next year
(06:43):
when a friend of mine was visiting
and her mother had said she could go out
with her boyfriend that was from the area,
but that I needed to go with them.
And I had just broken up with somebody.
And so I had no date.
So it would have been a threesome.
And I think that her boyfriend was like,
he wasn't comfortable with that.
And so he brought along a blind date
(07:04):
and it turned out to be Vince.
And when he walked in the door,
I said to my mother, I'm not going.
My mother said, yeah, you
are, you gave your word.
And so I thought, okay, I'll
make it really rough on him.
And so I didn't talk much.
And I tried to order the most
expensive thing on the menu.
(07:27):
And he came back the next day
and still was talking to me.
So, and then a couple of days later,
he asked me to go steady and
I'm just like, I don't know.
I wasn't really interested
in having just one boyfriend
at that time, but I
thought, okay, we can do that.
I was kind of dating other boyfriends
(07:49):
because I didn't want to be
in a relationship and get hurt.
So, but he seemed like a nice guy.
So I thought, okay.
So that continues for a little while.
Vince, your husband then
had interest in the Air Force.
And so that kind of brings us
back around to the aeronautics
(08:10):
and aviation side of things
that we were just talking about.
So when did you all get
married then in this process?
Was this before he joined the Air Force?
Yes, well, it was, I was still in high school
and he came to my senior prom and everything.
And he was already in
(08:30):
college and we got married in 1968
and just in between his junior and senior year.
And he had just came out of
bootcamp for the Air Force,
junior bootcamp or something.
It wasn't full fledged bootcamp.
(08:50):
I think it was ROTC bootcamp.
And so they had shaved his
head just before our wedding.
And so in the pictures, see
this guy with almost bald.
So, but yeah, so then we got married
and I worked full time
and went to school part time
and he would school full
(09:10):
time and worked part time.
So we had a very busy life.
And then we found out we
were gonna have our first child
right away, which was a surprise.
And he got out of the Air Force
and we went to Phoenix,
Arizona for pilot training,
which was, and we only had one car.
(09:34):
And so I got left home a lot.
But it was a nice place to
live and he worked very hard,
learning a lot.
But those must have been, you know,
difficult times in a way.
I mean, you know, if he's
going through flight training,
that's pretty rigorous,
(09:55):
you know, in the Air Force
and you're newly married, you've moved.
Yeah, they just paint a bit of a picture.
Like what was life like as a military wife?
And yeah, what was life like for you?
Well, the first year was very lonely
because he was gone sometimes 12 hours.
(10:17):
He would be, you know, grueling.
And I knew it was hard on him,
but I was also alone.
I had no friends.
My family wasn't there and I had a new baby.
And since I was an only child,
I didn't know how to take
care of a baby very well.
And so that was interesting,
(10:37):
but and only having one car,
so I could only go shopping,
you know, every week or two,
because the base was about a half an hour away.
And so he needed the car to go to work every day.
And so it was very, very
lonely and very kind of sad
(11:01):
from time to time, you know,
that I didn't really have any,
probably about six months
in, we made some friends
from some of the neighbors
that were also in pilot training.
So I knew their wives, but still, you know,
some of the other wives didn't have babies yet,
or they had more than one baby,
(11:23):
or, you know, they were more experienced.
And so we just kind of went day to day.
Yeah, so this is probably one of those things
where like marriage is
difficult at this point, right?
I mean, because again, like flight school,
the Air Force, like these are big career things
(11:44):
for your husband that I'm
sure takes so much time.
And then at some point in
here, he's deployed as well.
After he finished flight
school, then he went overseas
and I moved back to
California to be near my parents
so that I could get help with my daughter.
And I thought I'd go back to school.
So his mother had a daycare in her home.
(12:06):
And so she watched our daughter during the day
while I went back to school.
And after a while I decided we had some bills
and so I would go ahead and get a job.
And then so I was working
and trying to take care of her.
And then in that time,
(12:27):
she started having seizures.
So that took a lot of my time and energy
and trying to take care of
why she was having seizures
and making changes in our lifestyle and diet.
And everything to try and
figure out what was going on.
And this is all while Vince is out of the country
(12:47):
at war essentially.
And so all of my attention then was on,
just basically trying to
take care of our daughter
and see what was best for her.
And also try to pay off our bills.
We had a car payment and then because of,
(13:08):
because my father was not as
kind to me or to my daughter,
I couldn't live at home with them.
So I then had a rent payment to an apartment
and then you have bills,
electric bill, phone bill,
all of that.
So it was kind of a very
(13:30):
busy time then for me too.
So somewhere in this process,
you're not quite sure about this marriage thing.
Do you want to talk about that?
Yeah, before he went overseas,
because I'd felt so invisible
when he was in pilot training,
I just told him, I'm not sure about this.
So let's kind of take a break.
(13:51):
And so when he left and then
I got busy with our daughter
and all, I just kind of focused on that.
And, but then probably a little more than halfway
through that overseas tour that he had,
they had something called RnR, a Rest
and Relaxation, a Rest and Refreshment.
(14:15):
They sent us to Hawaii,
which is where we had had our honeymoon.
And so I said, yeah, I'll
go meet you there in Hawaii.
And so we kind of rekindled
because both of us were away from everything
and it was relaxing.
And so I thought, oh, okay,
maybe we can make this work.
So he came straight there from deployment.
(14:36):
Right.
So which that's a separate interview we did
with your husband then
how he was flying missions,
surveillance missions based out of Thailand
during the Vietnam war.
So flying into Vietnam and things.
Okay, so he comes straight from there.
Y'all are in Hawaii now.
Okay, so you got that part of life.
And then I'm guessing at some point,
(14:57):
military is like, okay, RnR is over.
You're reassigned to somewhere else.
No, he went back then overseas
and I went back to California.
And then at the end of that tour,
then he was assigned to B-52s.
And so he was, we went to Merced, California
for his training there.
(15:17):
And so I went with him to that.
And then from there, he was
assigned to upstate New York.
And so I went with him to upstate New York.
That's the whole way across the country.
Yeah.
It's a big move.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so we got up to New York and got settled in.
And then he got busy again,
(15:39):
being an Air Force officer and a pilot
and learning a new plane
and concentrating on being
the best he could in his career.
Very goal oriented and very career minded.
And so in time again,
I felt like he'd forgotten us.
(16:00):
And then he started having assignments to Guam.
And then we, I became a
with child with our second child.
And he was in Guam
about the time that I was going to deliver.
So I had flown back to
(16:21):
California to be with my parents
when I had the baby so
that his mom could help out
with our daughter and I could have our baby.
And I remember having our second child
and looking at the clock and realizing
that my husband was in Cambodia,
flying over Cambodia dropping bombs.
And I'm in this nice clean hospital,
(16:43):
giving birth to a baby.
And somebody else could be,
their babies could be dying.
You thought that.
And I think that's one of the pieces
that is pretty easy for us
to not really have our heads
(17:03):
around is all the separation and just the,
all the moving around too that's happening.
And this must've been disorienting perhaps,
or I don't even know the right word
because I haven't
experienced something like this.
Since my parents moved around so much,
to me it was just normal
life moving from place to place.
(17:24):
I know a lot of people ask me,
how do you handle that?
But it was like, that was the life
I had already experienced growing up
with my parents moving around so much.
My dad was one time at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
And by the time my mother and I got there
and they had just had a new house,
(17:44):
they moved into brand new built.
We were there two months
and he got transferred somewhere else.
And so it was kind of disorienting
going back to another place.
Is a sense of like, you
can't really settle necessarily.
Right.
(18:05):
So I just, I never lived anywhere until
we moved back to Ohio.
Well, when we moved to Ohio the first time,
was the first time I had ever lived anywhere
within a couple of years.
So you're in California for a
time with your second child.
(18:26):
Again, your husband is flying combat missions
in the Vietnam War again.
So multiple, it sounds like he
was over there multiple times.
Yeah, for a couple months at a time
or three months at a time.
And so then I, after having that baby,
I went back to New York,
went back to the military lifestyle
(18:48):
of just raising my children
and paying attention to them
because he was working so hard on his job.
And this is, so he gets back
and he'd be back at the
same base there in New York.
Right.
Right, so.
Yeah, in New York.
How long did that last before it was,
you started being like,
"I'm not sure this is working."
Probably about another year.
(19:10):
And then I started thinking,
"Something's got to change here."
And so I started searching
and talking to different people
and asking questions and everything.
And after about seven years of marriage,
I went in, decided,
I just,
(19:30):
my dad was not an easy person to live with.
And I always, growing up, always thought,
"Why does my mother stay with him?
He's abusive and why are we staying here?"
And I thought, if I ever get married,
I'm never gonna let this happen to my children.
And so I was just, in the back of my mind,
(19:52):
I was afraid that I would have a marriage
similar to that someday.
And so even though he was more ignoring us,
not intentionally, it just came out that way.
And I just thought, "I
don't wanna live like this.
I want somebody that,
I picked him because I
(20:12):
thought he would be a good father
and a good provider," which
he was an excellent provider,
but he wasn't there as a
husband or a father most of the time.
And so I thought, "Okay, I
think we need another separation."
So I was going to a lawyer
to get a legal separation
and the lawyer explained,
"It's cheaper to get a divorce."
And I didn't wanna cost too much money
(20:35):
and I didn't want to create a problem.
So I said, "Okay, we'll
just go for the divorce then."
And so I did, I filed for divorce
and I had to come up with 10 reasons
at that time in New York.
The lawyer said, "These
are pretty flimsy reasons."
And I said, "Well, I don't
wanna hurt his reputation
or I don't wanna make
people think bad about him."
(20:56):
And so he said, "Okay, we'll go with this."
And so when we filed for divorce
and I had him served with
papers while he was on alert
because I didn't know his reaction
because my father was an angry person,
but Vince wasn't, but I
didn't know how he would react.
When you say he was on alert,
what does that mean exactly?
(21:16):
That means that he was away from,
he was in this facility
underground there on the base.
He could not go away from that facility
except to the grocery store on
base or to the store on base,
but he couldn't come home for a week at a time.
He had to stay there ready to,
in case we had to go to nuclear war,
(21:38):
he could jump in his plane and take off.
Oh, wow.
Okay, so he's locked, I mean,
I guess the word like kind of locked in on base,
like, "Okay, I'm on for seven full days."
So, wow.
So he's getting the papers for divorce there,
like on base like that.
Right. Wow.
(22:00):
Yeah, and so he got the papers and he called me
and he said, "I didn't know we had any problems."
I'm just like, "Really?"
But then the court case came and I just,
it was as though something was pushing me
once I made that decision to file for papers.
(22:23):
It was like something
just pushing me towards that
and we even talked about it and he said,
"You know, do you really
have to do it at the time?"
"Yeah, yeah."
And so he didn't even show up at the court
and the judge even looked at me and said,
"Well, these are pretty soft reasons."
(22:47):
And my lawyer said, "Well, yeah."
And the judge just said,
"She wants to take her
children to go back to California."
And my lawyer said, "Well,
that's where her parents are.
That's where she can- she has no friends or family here."
And the judge said, "Is
that okay with her husband?"
And the lawyer said,
"Yeah, he isn't contesting it."
(23:08):
And so the judge said, "Okay."
And he slams the gavel down.
And it was like, kind of
like an explosion in my ears.
I thought, "That's it?"
He said, "Grant it."
And all of a sudden this pressure that was on me
to get this done and you have to do this,
it was gone and I was just confused.
(23:30):
Then what have I done?
And then as we were walking out,
I said to my lawyer, "What do I have to do now?
Is there a waiting period?"
He said, "Nope, nope, it's all over.
You can go down the hall
and marry somebody else now."
I thought, "How cold and how heartless?"
And it just seemed strange.
(23:53):
I was just like so vulnerable at that time
that had Vince been there,
I probably would have said,
"Oh, let's call this whole thing off.
This is silly."
But he wasn't, he didn't know.
And so then I went home and I was already
in a separate bedroom and everything
(24:14):
and just started getting
ready to pack for movers to come
to move me to California,
which my father was gonna pay for.
And Vince even appealed when the movers got there
to me to stay.
But once I had made this, called the movers
and set everything up,
there came that pressure again.
(24:36):
You have to do this.
You said, "You're gonna do this.
You gotta go through with this."
And it was as though, almost as though the enemy
was just pushing me, like a demonic force on me
to get this done.
You need this.
(24:56):
And so I don't think, if somebody had offered me
a hundred thousand dollars even at that moment,
there was this pressure, I had to do this.
And so then driving in a little Mustang
with two children in a
car by myself to California.
From New York.
So that's like over what,
2000 miles or something?
(25:17):
Yeah, took me several days.
Plus I had car trouble along the way.
And everything, and on the way I'm just like,
what have I done?
Well, yeah, that's kind
of what I'm wanting to dig
into that a little actually.
It's so- you've left your husband,
you're moving like all the way across the country
from New York all the way
(25:38):
to, back to LA, I guess,
Los Angeles.
Right, that's where my parents were at the time.
And you're essentially starting a new life.
That must've been really difficult.
Tell me, yeah, like talk to
me about that new chapter,
I guess, a new phase of
your life going through that.
My parents had a vacant
(25:58):
house that they owned next door
to them that hadn't been rented in years.
And so my father said,
I'll give you a reduced rent
if you will clean it up,
clean up the yard and everything.
And so we moved in there.
And then I decided I'll
try and go back to school,
but with that didn't last very long
(26:19):
because I couldn't really
afford food for the children
or all of the utilities it took and pay him rent.
And he was very firm on it.
He says, I'm giving you reduced rent.
You know what I'm thinking?
So after a while, I just was on my way home
(26:39):
from school one day.
I thought, what am I gonna do?
And I saw this bookstore and I went in
and I had never heard of a
Christian bookstore in my life.
And evidently it was a Christian bookstore,
but I didn't know that, I just saw books.
And so I was looking on books about divorce
and what do I do now and all that.
(27:00):
And this young girl came up to me
and she asked to help me and I said, no.
And I tried to put down the book behind me
so she couldn't see what I was looking at
because I was embarrassed.
And she said, "Well, you new in town?"
And I said, "No, I went to high school here
and, but kind of new back in town."
(27:21):
And so she said, "Well, do you have a church?"
And I thought, well, I had converted to Catholic
to marry Vince.
And so as a divorced, I could
no longer take the sacraments.
So I needed a new church.
Okay, so that's, okay.
So you would have been converted to Catholic
(27:41):
and then since the divorce, that's like,
this would have been-
No, I converted to Catholic to marry him.
To marry him. And then because of the divorce though,
now you can't take the sacraments.
You can't take the sacraments at church because-
I didn't think of that.
And so I thought, well, I need a new church.
And so she says, Well, why
don't you come to our church?"
She jotted it down and gave me the card.
(28:03):
And so I stuck it in my pocket and I said,
well, I'll see, I'll think about it.
And it took me a couple of
weeks to get up enough nerve
to go to visit their church by myself.
And everybody was so nice
and just kind of accepted me in
everything and I thought, this is interesting.
And so I went for a couple of weeks
and then I took my children,
(28:23):
which they thought were my
little brother and sister.
And I said, no, these are my children.
And they put me in the youth group
because I was still going to school.
That was where I really needed to be
because young people are honest.
They don't pull punches with God or with others.
If they see a problem, they tell you.
(28:45):
If they believe something, they believe it
or they question it.
And so I'm hearing all
these people talking about,
they prayed about a test or they prayed about
their relationship with their parents.
And then they come back
the next week to youth group.
They say, all these answers they got.
I'm thinking, God doesn't
care about these little things.
(29:06):
What do you, you know,
grow up and just deal with it.
But they, after a while, I thought, you know,
I had a test in school too.
So I thought, okay, I'll pray.
And I did better on the test.
I relaxed and everything.
And then I thought, they have
something I don't have though.
(29:28):
Just because God answered one prayer,
I still didn't know him.
And they had asked me, are you a Christian?
I said, well, I'm an American.
Of course, I'm a Christian.
Oh, what an interesting response.
I live in America.
Yeah, yeah.
Because it's just like, you were raised with this
(29:48):
and you kind of went to church sometimes.
I just assumed I was a Christian
because I knew who Jesus was.
Yeah, yeah.
But I didn't really know him like they did.
And that became evident after a while.
Like when you responded that way.
I mean, yeah, like I'm an American.
They just said, okay.
You know, they were nice about it.
(30:08):
Yeah, they were probably being like,
we might need to talk about this again, right?
So they just kind of let me go and they figured,
she'll figure it out.
Which I did as I saw the other young people
were saying different things
that the Lord had done for them.
And I thought, I could really use some help
because I was starting to,
the rheumatoid arthritis
(30:29):
that I'd gotten at 14 that had become dormant
was starting to get bad again.
And I couldn't pay my bills.
And I thought, you know, if there's some way
that I can get some help somewhere
and I wasn't gonna tell anybody,
I was too prideful to tell anybody
about all the problems I was having.
(30:50):
So I thought, well, you know, if God can help,
I'll just ask.
And so I heard them praying in ways
that I hadn't thought of before.
I mean, I talked to God all the time, I thought,
but I didn't really expect an answer.
Oh, interesting.
And so I went to the youth pastor and said,
(31:13):
I think they have something I don't have.
And he said, well, tell me about it.
And so I told him, I said, they pray with meaning
and they expect answers.
And he said, don't you?
Well, yeah, sorta, but, you know.
And so he said, well, let's
take care of this right now.
And he says, do you have Jesus
(31:33):
as your personal Lord and Savior?
I just kinda looked at him, I said,
I don't know.
And he said, then you may not.
So anyway, he led me through the sinner's prayer
and said, you know, now pray and see.
And so it was different.
I went home and I opened up the Bible
(31:55):
and it was like a whole different book.
It was as though the Lord
gave me this extra feeling
that I needed.
And a few days later, they asked me
if I wanted to be baptized.
And so I said, "If- I've
been baptized as a Catholic."
and they said, "Well, you
(32:17):
weren't really a Christian though."
Okay, so then I agreed to
be baptized the next Sunday.
And so I did.
That's quite the story of those people.
I mean, I'm trying to think the right words here,
but it's like they gave you a chance in a way
(32:39):
or like welcomed you in without,
it doesn't sound like there
was just all this pressure
of like, you need to get saved,
but yet they lived out
something that you could see,
like, wait a minute,
something's not lining up
with what I thought I had.
You know, what I thought
I had actually isn't real.
I'm seeing something here.
(33:00):
Am I getting that about...?
Yeah, they weren't trying to witness to me
and knock me over with Scripture.
They just lived it out in front of me.
The other thing was when I came to them,
I was wearing short dresses, tight dresses,
and I noticed everybody around me,
they weren't dressed that way.
(33:21):
And so very quickly, I
started sewing up different dresses,
longer dresses, you know, looser dresses,
and everything so that I would fit in.
I wanted to be part of this group.
And, but they, one thing was they had told me,
well, they took me to a seminar for young people.
(33:42):
And every one of those seminars,
they say the exact same thing.
You have the same
notebook, they say the same thing.
But the Lord uses different things
as just as though you read a Scripture,
and one day you read it and the
Lord can speak to you this way
and another day you read
it and the Lord shows you
something different from that same scripture.
Well, that's what happened with this seminar.
(34:03):
The first one I went to, they, all I got from it
was forgiveness and honoring your parents.
And I was like, Lord, you have no idea
what my dad was like then.
Remember, I'm a new
Christian and I'm telling God,
you don't know what my dad was like.
You don't know what happened growing up.
You have no idea what I went through.
(34:24):
And, but I kept going, as
I looked at the Scriptures,
I kept coming to forgiveness.
And so I, that, okay, he had been abusive
towards both me and my children.
We're living next door to him.
And he had already been
abusive since we'd been back.
He had hurt my daughter and
(34:45):
had belted her with belts,
left stripes on her legs and everything.
And so I mustered up
enough strength to go next door
and ask him for forgiveness
from what I had been like growing up.
I said, I don't think my
attitude was always right.
(35:05):
And I probably displayed rebellion.
And I want to ask your forgiveness.
And my dad just looked at me
and I kind of stood between,
there was a kind of opening between the kitchen
and the living room.
And I stood on the other side of the wall
because I didn't know if he was going to punch me
or get mad or slap me or throw
(35:28):
his hot coffee at me or what.
But he just looked at me and I waited.
And finally he said, well, yeah,
you were a little difficult raising.
And I waited and then he says, yeah, okay.
And turned around and went on about his business.
And I thought, well, I'm
(35:48):
going to leave before he gets mad
or thinks of some reason
that I've done something.
But from that day on,
he never bothered me or my children again.
So I know that the Lord had
something to do with that.
Wow.
I mean, that must have been incredibly difficult
(36:08):
to ask forgiveness in a situation like that. It was
more scary than anything
because I didn't know how he was going to react
if he was going to, my dad's lips,
when he would get mad,
would get real flat and quiver.
And I just watched to see, is
he going to get upset with me?
(36:30):
And so I asked for forgiveness and then waited.
And then I left as quickly as I could
because I just didn't
know what he was going to do.
Wow.
Like this is showing though,
when you would have say first moved back,
like from when you leave Vince, your ex-husband
(36:50):
and you move back to California
before you become a Christian,
I'm guessing you would have
never done something like that.
No, because I was very bitter against him
for the things that he had
done to me and to my children.
And he was continuing already to bother me
(37:14):
and hurt my children.
And so I was very afraid of him.
He was a very big man.
So I just didn't know how he would handle it.
That's incredible.
That took a lot of courage, I think.
I think it was just the Lord was behind me.
Is there more on this
(37:36):
about restoring relationships?
You know, after you come to Christ
and learning some of these things
about forgiveness and restoration.
Yeah, is there more pieces to that, that you'd like to add into this?
Well, the next seminar
then about six months later,
three months later, the same seminar,
(37:57):
all I heard during that was
about Christian marriages.
And I thought, wow, that's really nice
if people have a marriage like that,
but mine wasn't like that.
It can't be; I'm not married.
Well, maybe if I got married to a Christian guy,
it would be like that.
So I'd talk to the youth by then.
They said, oh yeah, you can get married.
You came to us single.
(38:18):
So in Corinthians, it talks about as you come in,
that's how you are.
I think it's 1 Corinthians
7:19 or something like that.
And I believed that.
And I thought, well, that would be good.
So I went home to look in my Bible,
but everything I opened up to, it said,
(38:39):
if you have been divorced, you either stay single
or you get remarried.
I'm like, I don't like that Scripture.
You know, and I kept going
back and forth, back and forth.
And so that went on for several months.
Oh, wow.
Okay, so you wrestled with this one.
Oh yeah, yeah, because I wanted my children
to have a good life.
(39:01):
I just wanted, I thought Christian marriage
would be really nice, but how am I gonna do that?
And so I finally got enough
nerve to pray and ask God,
if you want me to get remarried,
then Vince needs to call me
(39:22):
and ask me to remarry him.
And the next night the phone rings.
Just like, no, no, no, we can't do this.
And I answered the phone and it's Vince.
And he says,
What do you think about getting remarried
or something like that?
I forget his exact words,
but it was just factual.
(39:43):
Just there.
Just like, this is the same person.
I said, well, call me back tomorrow night.
Cause I just heard at youth group,
Satan can appear as an angel of light.
And I thought, this is a deception.
He heard my prayer cause I had prayed out loud.
(40:03):
And so then I sat down by the side of the bed
and prayed this time I
was quiet about my prayers.
And I said--
You want to make sure it doesn't get hijacked.
-exactly.
And so I said, okay, God, if this is really you,
this time you have him
call me back with soft words,
emotion, something, talking in words
(40:25):
that he normally doesn't say,
and kind of woo me.
Like, I want to feel like
I'm really wanted for me,
not just because he needs
his next promotion or whatever.
And so, okay.
Cause he's never going to talk to me that way
(40:46):
over the phone, just won't happen.
Next night, phone rings
and I thought, uh-huh, sure.
And I answered the phone and I'm just like,
who is this guy on the other hand?
It didn't sound like him, his voice was soft
and it was soothing.
And he said, you know, I love you.
And he was giving me all the good words.
(41:07):
And I thought, wait a minute,
Satan's probably somehow knew
that I was going to do this.
So I said, okay, I still need to think this over.
So I'll call you back.
So for five days I fasted.
Oh, wow.
Totally fast, water only.
Because I just was sure that God-
(41:29):
And I told God, I said, you
don't know what I went through.
I don't want a marriage like my parents.
I want a good marriage.
I want a Christian marriage like I heard about.
I want this and I want that.
And he smokes and he drinks.
And there's all these other
things that I kept telling,
it's as though God didn't know all this already,
but I'm a new Christian.
And I thought, God oughta hear all this stuff
(41:51):
that's bothering me.
So was Vince a Christian at this point then?
I'm sorry, yes.
Actually he had come to visit us.
I'm sorry, he had come to visit us
and had attended church with us
because our oldest daughter had asked
that she wanted to show
him to her Sunday School's
(42:12):
And he had actually prayed a
sinner's prayer with a deacon.
And when he told me, I'm just like, uh-huh, sure.
You're telling me a Catholic became a Christian
because he was a dyed in the wool Catholic type.
But it really sunk.
And I gave him a Bible and he
had been reading this Bible.
(42:33):
And I'd been telling him
about all of the miracles
that God had been doing in
our lives throughout the year.
Somebody coming in and paying for the gas
to be turned on in our house
because I didn't have the money.
Nobody owned up to it.
We were out of food.
And so I prayed with the children.
(42:54):
And the next morning I opened
the door to take them to school
and take my daughter to school
and my son to the sitter in major school.
And there was four bags of
groceries sitting on our front porch.
Do you know how that happened?
No.
Oh, that's amazing. Nobody owned up to it.
Wow, like what was this
(43:15):
40 years ago or something?
Somebody did that and they probably have no idea.
I mean, they probably never found out
like how big of an impact things like that have.
Oh, that's incredible.
But even, and I told Vince about it and he said,
"Well, you probably told somebody
that you were out of food."
I said, "I don't think so.
I may have said something,
(43:35):
but I didn't detail what I needed."
And Angela had said, "I want some chips.
I want to make some cookies, mom."
And I said, "Uh, we don't have any flour.
We don't have any sugar right now.
We just have the basics."
And in the bag was flour, sugar, chocolate chips,
(43:56):
potato chips, some cereal, all the things.
So this is happening.
Oh man, there's a lot of
things coming together here
where so much of your life
as you're like starting a new life
in Los Angeles and divorced
and all these things and
then finding Christianity.
(44:18):
And then those moments where God answers prayer,
like that must have been, I
don't know, earth shattering
is the word that comes to mind,
but just like overwhelming of like,
"Whoa, this is a new life."
Or like, "This is a different
life than what you expected."
It showed me, for a new Christian,
it showed me that prayer really works
and that God really cares
(44:39):
about our everyday things.
So it was even more than the little tests
that people were praying about.
These were, to me, it meant food for my children
and for me and warmth over the winter.
And I had started Bible
school there at the church.
(44:59):
They had, several of the youth
were going to Bible school at night.
And so I thought, "I'll go too,
because I need to learn more about the Bible."
And we were studying the Pentateuch,
the first five books of the Bible.
And I saw in there about their eating habits.
And I was very, very sore
with rheumatoid arthritis
(45:19):
and was told that I would be
in a wheelchair by Thanksgiving
and probably in the hospital by Christmas.
And this was the end of September.
And this would have been in like,
in the mid 1970s or something.
1975.
Well, I saw you walking earlier today.
So I'm assuming that didn't happen.
(45:40):
Right.
So you want to tell me about that?
So I decided I would try as close as I could
doing a diet more similar to
what God had told the Israelites.
This is my favorite foods
since I was a southerner
where cornbread and beans and you put ham in them
(46:01):
and shrimp, crawfish, shrimp, catfish.
And I had to cut all those out.
I mean, I didn't have to, but I chose to do that
to see if it would work.
And so the next time I went to the doctor
towards the end of
October, beginning of November,
I had been on this for over three weeks.
(46:23):
And the doctor said, "You should have been
hurting more by now."
I said, "No, actually I'm
really starting to feel better.
I am in less pain."
He says, "Well, it's getting colder.
So you're going to get worse."
But I didn't, I kept getting
better and better and better.
And Christmas time, I was down on the floor
(46:45):
and up again with the children.
To this day, I do not eat any catfish, shrimp,
any shellfish, any pork products.
And when I have accidentally gotten some pork,
I do have some stiffness and pain in joints.
That's wild.
That is so wild.
(47:07):
I'm guessing that the doctor was really confused.
Yeah.
Years later, my mother got arthritis
and I told her, I said, "Go off of ham."
And she's like, "I can't do that."
I said, "Yeah, you can."
And so we went to the doctor and the doctor said,
"Okay, no more white
flour, no white sugar, no pork,
(47:32):
and reduce your red meat."
And I think that there was something else.
And my mother just looked at her and said,
"What am I supposed to eat?"
But when she would stay off of pork herself,
she started feeling better too.
It's different for different people,
but it definitely worked for us.
(47:55):
What's getting me here is, you're just reading,
you're doing some Bible studies
on the first five books of the Bible,
like the Law, the Pentateuch, whatever Torah,
whatever you wanna call it.
And you're just picking
that up as a new Christian
and saying, "Oh, well, hey, let me try it."
That simple faith or that
(48:17):
just pretty straightforward of,
I see this in scripture, maybe this would help.
That's kind of, there's
something pretty neat about that.
So all this is going on,
man, yeah, there's a lot here.
And so Vince has come out and visited.
You gave him a Bible, I think he said, right?
(48:38):
You've been reading the Bible.
So that gets us up to these phone calls
that you're exchanging and then he's saying,
"Well, should we get married again?" basically.
So yeah, walk me through that now.
So after five days of fasting, at the youth group,
they talked about faith and they said,
(49:01):
"Real faith is like walking past a pool
and seeing there's water in it,
climbing up to the high dive,
getting out to the end of the diving board
and looking down and
there's no water in the pool,
but God's told you to jump
and he'll take care of it.
When you get there, there'll be water."
(49:22):
And I thought, that's what this feels like.
And I felt like, okay, I'm
going to have faith in God
that he's behind all this.
And so I called Vince back and I said,
"Yeah, I guess I'll remarry you."
And so he came out and I set
(49:43):
up this wedding very quickly
and it was a real time wedding
compared to the first one, which was a big thing
and asked my dad, well,
Vince had actually called my dad
this time and said, "I'd
like to marry Charlette again."
And my dad said, "You didn't ask the first time."
(50:06):
And Vince said, "Well, I'm
trying to do it right this time."
My dad said, "Well, okay, but you're gonna have
to pay me back what I spent
bringing her out here."
And Vince said, "Okay."
And he had some money in the bank, so he did.
He paid my dad back.
And so I asked my dad to
walk me down the aisle again
and he said, "Okay."
And so at the back of the church though,
(50:27):
before we walked down the aisle, he says,
"My car's just outside.
I have the keys right here.
You couldn't back out of the first one
because he said I had too much money in it,
but you can back out of this one.
I'll pay you back if you want
to back out of this wedding."
I said, "No, this is what God wants me to do."
And he wasn't too happy
(50:49):
about that, but he said, "Okay."
So we walked down the aisle.
And even when I got up
there and I looked at Vince,
I thought, "Oh, am I really doing this again?
Okay, God, you're gonna have to do something
because I don't really feel love at this point.
I don't hate him.
I like him.
(51:10):
He's a nice person, but I
would like to have love."
And so we said our vows.
And when I said I do,
it was as though God dropped this veil over me.
And I just felt love beyond
what I'd ever felt before.
And I thought, "Wow, I got it. I got it."
(51:30):
And we walked out and then
we went to the same seminar,
that I'd been to, for our honeymoon.
And this veil of love only lasted three days
and then it was gone.
And I was like, "What happened?"
But in the Bible we read that it says
that the older women are
to teach the younger women
to love their husbands.
(51:52):
So if it can be taught, it can be learned.
And so as I read my Bible,
I learned about God's love and how to apply it.
And God is constantly teaching us
and we're constantly learning.
And so I learned through the Lord how to love.
And so we have love now and God gave us the love.
(52:16):
But at the seminar, Vince is sitting there
with his arms crossed, like he's bored.
He's kind of being nice
about listening and everything,
but just kind of bored.
And on the fourth night, all
of a sudden he leans forward
and he goes, "You know what? This will work.
This will work. This will really work."
And I said, "What are you talking about?
This is God's word."
And he goes, "No, no, no. The Air Force uses it."
(52:38):
And I'm like, "No, this is God's word."
And he says, "No, no, this will work."
He says, "This memorizing
and putting it into action
and knowing all of it."
He says, "That's it. I've been looking for a plan
and that's it. The Bible has
a plan for us, for our lives."
And I'm like, "Yeah."
Forgetting that he never had a Bible growing up.
(53:00):
I mean, I had Bibles and I read them
and I memorized S cripture growing up,
but it never meant anything to me.
It was just there.
And now we knew.
And so he just got excited
and just took off with it.
You know, there's, I think
there's some analogies here,
you know, how in the Air Force,
(53:22):
say I'm sure you'd have like those flight manuals
or something.
I wonder if there's some connections happening
in the brain for him.
That's what he said.
Oh really?
Yeah, that's what he said.
It's just like the Air Force.
Yeah, this is the flight manual that like,
instead of a flight manual, it's a life manual.
How about that?
He just caught on and just ran with it.
He's always been the kind that,
(53:43):
when he catches on something,
he locks on and it's over.
He just goes.
This is incredible.
You know, if, say in the weeks leading up to you
filing that divorce paperwork,
if you could have seen
like all the different things
that were gonna happen in
your life in the coming years,
because a lot of this,
this all happens in a
relatively short period of time,
(54:04):
does it not?
Couple years.
Yeah.
You know, that's just incredible.
Like how much transformation,
reconciliation is the big
word that's coming to my mind.
The forgiveness that you were describing earlier,
the restoring of relationships,
has some, that's potent stuff right there.
(54:25):
So you would have moved back then with him
back to New York then?
Right.
So tell me about,
you're back in New York,
your husband continues on as
an officer in the Air Force,
but now things are a little different, right?
I mean, this Christian thing is real now.
(54:46):
I'm guessing there were a
lot of lifestyle things,
habits, ways you did stuff
that like, wait a minute,
maybe we should make some changes here.
Tell me about some of those.
Well, he was used to going
to the bar on Friday nights
and debriefing, they sometimes called it,
but drinking and getting with all the guys
(55:08):
and talking and everything.
And so he asked me,
I want you to go with me.
And I'm just like,
this is not where a Christian woman should be.
And I prayed about it.
I just felt like the Lord saying, just go,
support your husband.
So we set up to the bar,
on bar stools up to the bar,
and somebody would come and say,
(55:29):
oh, I haven't seen you in ages.
Where have you been?
And I said, oh, well,
this is what happened to me.
And I started telling them about getting saved.
And I said, do you know the Lord?
And they very quickly said,
oh, I think I need to do something else.
And they would leave.
And this happened two or three,
maybe four weeks that we
would go on Friday night.
And I had told him about a
(55:50):
Bible study on Friday night.
And he said, but we can't go
because we go to the bar on Friday night.
But one night he says, you know what?
Nobody seems to talk to us at the bar anymore.
I said, well, I don't know.
I talk to anybody that comes up and talks to me.
I didn't tell him what I was saying.
But he said, so why don't
(56:10):
we try that Bible study?
Oh, really?
So that's, wow, what a change there.
And so he says, but
there's fighter pilots at that.
And he says, bomber pilots and fighter pilots
don't necessarily get along.
And I said, well, you know,
as Christians, maybe they do.
So we went and he just really,
they just took us in like we
(56:31):
were on the same level as them.
There wasn't any animosity,
fighter/bomber animosity.
And there were farmers
there too, you know, which-
How about that?
It was just, everybody was on the same level.
We were all fairly new
Christians and seeking the word
and just having a Bible study,
(56:51):
learning what God was showing us.
And he just, again,
enjoyed it and took off with it.
Yeah, were there other things that you changed
as the years go by?
I'm sure not everything
just magically poof, you know,
gets fixed all in one fell swoop.
You know, I'm sure this is a process here.
(57:13):
Well, then he, like the
majority of non-Christian men
had a stack of pornography underneath the bed
and it was still there when we got remarried.
And so every time I made the bed,
I just slipped my hand
down there and touched and said,
Lord, you know, this shouldn't be here,
but I'm not gonna tell him,
(57:34):
I want you to work with him on this
because I'd been reading books on,
"Put your husband first and to be submissive
and to be kind and not to
try to preach to the husband."
You know, and so I thought, okay, Lord,
you've got this and so,
(57:55):
and then I'd walk by the liquor cabinet
and put my hand up there and say,
Lord, this needs to be gone too.
You know, this is not what I
expect in a Christian home.
And so I came home from the commissary,
which is a grocery store on base one day
and he's out in the backyard with barbecue
and he's got these
magazines and he's burning them.
(58:17):
And I waited till the very last one was on fire
and I went out there and I said, what you doing?
He goes, well, I just had this feeling
that God didn't want me to have these around.
Like, really?
Okay, that's really good.
That's really, really good.
And so a few weeks later, again, I came home
(58:39):
and he's in the kitchen
pouring out the bottles of liquor
into the sink and I again waited
until the last drop was
poured out of the last bottle.
And I walked over and I said,
we have a crew party Friday night.
I'll just make some punch.
And he just, the look on his face,
he looked at me like, oh my goodness,
what are we gonna do?
I said, now, you know,
(59:00):
you're the aircraft commander.
You're the head guy.
Nobody's gonna question you.
And he's like, umm... and I said, no, no,
let's try it.
And so we had this table and had some punch on it
and all the goodies out there.
And you saw people looking at their drink,
at their punch and kind of sniffing it
and going to where they knew the liquor was kept,
(59:21):
opening the cabinet, it was empty, going back,
but nobody ever said a word.
So this was like a, just like
you had the flight crew over.
So this is the guys he
flies with basically, right?
For the B-52, that he commanded.
The six guys that flew under- with him.
Yeah, okay, so.
And their wives.
That must have been hard in a way though, right?
(59:43):
Cause you're kind of going out on a limb
with these people that you work with, you know,
and I don't know, I can imagine that,
but that would have been a little hard, right?
He was more worried than I was.
I was just like, we're gonna do this.
You know, God's gonna take care of it.
That's funny, that's funny.
Cause they're just like, why is there,
there's no alcohol in this punch?
(01:00:05):
It was more courage for him
than it was for me, you know,
because he's the big macho guy
and the aircraft commander and.
And the aircraft commander is
not serving, you know, alcohol.
Yeah, is he gonna look wimpy or something?
Wow, but that's, there's
something to that though,
where it's not just, you say a prayer
and move on with your life.
(01:00:25):
Like there's things that have to change here.
And I can imagine, again, I'm guessing
this is a long process, right?
You know, this doesn't happen right away.
It was over weeks, but it was in the first year
that we were remarried.
It was in the first year, but
it didn't all happen at once.
It was several weeks in between,
(01:00:46):
but the Lord was working
and just bringing us along
at the speed that the Lord
knew that we could handle,
as if we'd known in the beginning,
everything we were gonna go through.
I don't know that we would have signed on.
It's too much too quick,
you know, it's almost done.
Yeah, yeah.
So that gets us a little closer to today,
(01:01:09):
but we're not quite there yet.
Somewhere in that process,
you go from being a military wife, you know,
you're very, obviously the Air Force
is your husband's career.
I mean, that's his world, you know,
for so much of y'all's marriage.
(01:01:29):
Well, yeah, basically up to this point,
that was what you all knew.
Where does that change start happening?
Because you're clearly, some
things have changed since then.
Talk me through that process.
We started trying to go to churches
that we felt like really knew the Lord.
We actually went through the Charismatic Church
(01:01:50):
and realized through a stillbirth that I had
that that was all emotion,
not real caring of people
and not, they were disrespectful to God.
I felt like after I
looked back on it at the time,
we felt like it was the way to go,
but there's people seeking in every denomination
(01:02:12):
that we went through.
There are true seekers that are really trying
to serve the Lord.
And then we went through other churches,
each time getting a little bit more conservative,
thinking these people are gonna be
really trying to serve the Lord.
And there were some in each church,
but probably not as a whole
as much as what we wanted.
(01:02:33):
And so we kept looking and looking.
And I was teaching bread classes.
We had moved back to Ohio the second time
and I had started teaching bread classes
and I didn't advertise
it, but I got a call one day
from German Baptist ladies
(01:02:53):
and they wanted to come and do a bread class.
And I said, sure.
So they came over and I noticed,
I think the first time they
came there was four of them.
And then they said, this is pretty good.
We're gonna come back, bring
our sisters, other sisters.
I thought, how big is their family?
I just assumed, they meant sister sisters.
And so they came back and they said,
(01:03:14):
well, how many can we bring?
And I said, well, if you bring your own chairs,
you could probably fit 30 or 40 ladies in here,
but however many, we only have so much seating.
And so they came back with, I don't know,
at least 15 ladies, maybe more.
And they were all dressed
in the same style of dress,
(01:03:35):
different colors, same style of cap.
And they all had glowing faces and they acted
like they were just happy as could be
and they talked with each other.
And the feeling of
camaraderie or family was so strong
and they just seemed like they knew
(01:03:57):
where they were going and everything.
And so I said to one of them,
I think I'm gonna be one of you someday.
This was probably the
staunchest lady in the whole group.
And she just looked at me and Vince was just off
of active duty, but still working
for the government at that time.
And she just looked at me and
(01:04:17):
she said, well, that's nice.
She didn't say no, can't do it,
but she just said, that's nice.
And then about a month later,
some of the Millers had come to me.
They had a bakery in town, not too far from us
and asked me if I would bake for the store
because I ground my own wheat and did wheat bread
(01:04:39):
and rolls and everything.
And they said, can you come
and bring your wheat bread in
because we don't have any brown wheat bread.
So I did and I started asking questions
because they're all German Baptist in there.
Started asking pointed questions.
And finally I said, can I visit sometime?
(01:05:01):
And so Vince said, yeah, you
can visit when I'm out of town.
So I did, I started
visiting and that was back in 1993.
And so I visited from time to time all the way up
until 2010, we had been
going to another Baptist church
that we thought was even more conservative
(01:05:21):
for about four years, but it was turning out
it wasn't really where we wanted to be.
And I suggested to Vince,
why don't you come with me
to visit the German Baptist?
And he's like, ah, you
know, it's kind of different.
And he said, well, all right, I'll try.
And so he went and he says,
(01:05:42):
they had a dinner afterwards
and he looked around and he said,
I can see why you like these people.
They're just so welcoming and
everybody's just so friendly
and kind and so then we started going one Sunday
to the Baptist church and another Sunday
to the German Baptist and
after a while Vince said,
we have to make a decision here.
What are we gonna do?
And so he said, I said, well, he says,
(01:06:05):
I can't handle the non-resistance thing though
because we'd gone to a baptism and up until then
he was doing fine and then when he heard
they were non-resistant, he goes,
did you know they were non-resistant?
Did you know? Yeah.
You did, okay. And I said, yes,
I understand it.
Because I couldn't say I agree
(01:06:26):
because that would be usurping his authority.
So I just said, I understand it.
And he said like, well, how's that gonna work?
Because at this point, y'all had,
let's see, y'all had been in
the military for like 24 years.
And he was working back as a
contractor for the military.
Yeah, so you've been in
(01:06:46):
this world for a long time.
Like I can imagine this isn't just like a little,
you know, mental exercise of
thinking through non-resistance.
This is pretty significant for your lifestyle.
So I gave him books on non-resistance.
I gave him CDs on non-resistance.
He listened to all of them, but you know,
he's a very strong thinker.
(01:07:07):
And so he could pick out things and say,
well, you know, this
didn't quite answer the question
or this sidesteps this or that,
and he wasn't quite convinced.
And so I said, make your list.
And so he made a list of questions that he had
and they invited us to their annual conference.
So he went to the annual conference and he said,
you know, I'm tired of this.
We've got to get some answers.
(01:07:28):
And so he set it up that we were going to talk
to one of the ministers and he wasn't available.
So we talked to Todd Boone
and Todd sat on one side of the table
and we sat on the other side
and we were at Cedarville University
and behind Todd was this big pool.
And so as Todd opened the scriptures to Vince,
instead of hitting non-resistance,
(01:07:50):
he talked to him about two kingdoms.
We had never heard about two kingdoms.
We'd never heard that concept.
And so I watched Vince and as
he gathered the understanding,
it's just as though his face started gleaming.
And all of a sudden he said, I get it now.
There's water, let's go.
And Todd's like, no, you know,
(01:08:13):
there's some things we got to talk over first.
And so, because I'd been telling them all along,
if he catches it, he's going to run with it.
And everybody's saying, I don't know.
He's, you know, he seems
like a hard cookie to crack.
And I'm just like, no, I'm telling you, you know,
once he catches something and
he knows truth when he sees it.
(01:08:34):
And when he hears truth and he catches it,
he goes with it.
So he was ready.
And so then Cedarville
wouldn't let us be baptized there.
So the next Sunday we were baptized
into the German Baptist Church.
And that was in...
2011.
(01:08:56):
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Like what a story, you know,
there's been so many
different points along the way
leading up to where we sit right now.
And it's just kind of hard to even imagine
like all the dominoes in the chain, so to speak,
to get us here.
God is good.
Yeah, wow, isn't that something?
I'm still thinking back to
that doctor in, you know,
(01:09:17):
1975 or whatever that says,
you're gonna be in a
wheelchair by Christmas, you know?
And those people who took you in, you know,
in LA back then and
welcomed you into their church.
And then all these other
little points along the way
and the story that gets us here,
that's pretty incredible when you stop and think
all of that in one piece.
(01:09:37):
It's like, wow.
That just kind of proves if
we're really seeking the Lord
and we're reading His word
and we're listening to the word more so sometimes
than what people are telling us.
Because everybody has an opinion.
And sometimes, I mean, we're
learning still many things.
We don't have everything all together yet.
(01:09:59):
We're still learning a lot of things.
But as the Lord leads us and we're learning,
if we stick with His word,
we're gonna get there eventually.
And I mean, we're never gonna totally arrive
until we get to heaven.
But the Lord is good and brings us,
starts with where we are and just takes us along.
(01:10:23):
So there's probably a lot
of people listening to this
that are maybe struggling with what they feel
Christ is calling them to in their own lives.
And in your life, you've
been describing a lot of changes
and restoration and forgiveness
and yeah, a lot of different pieces there.
As you sought out, what is Christ calling you to.
(01:10:46):
So as we bring all this to a close,
the story to a close,
what would you say to encourage those people
that may be going through a similar situation
or going through challenging times right now?
You need to just keep searching Scripture
and comparing your life to the Scripture
and listening to the Lord
and seeking wisdom from those around.
(01:11:10):
And as I look back on some of
the churches that we went to,
how they twisted,
unfortunately, some of the Scriptures.
Don't always just take it
as what someone tells you,
compare the Scriptures with Scriptures
and know what the Lord's really saying
and what His word says.
(01:11:31):
Because then we may not be right
where He wants us at that
time, but He will bring us there.
But we have to keep our
eyes on the Lord, not on men.
Because the men around us,
the people around us can
fail us, but God won't fail.
God's there no matter what.
(01:11:54):
Even Moses made a mistake.
But he's still, and
David, we've all made mistakes,
but God is a God of mercy.
But if we keep our eyes on Him,
He can still bring us to where He wants us.
Powerful stuff.
Charlette, I really appreciate you
(01:12:14):
bringing your story to us today.
I feel like, yeah, it's been a privilege
to sit here and hear this and
to learn from your experience.
And yeah, I just thank you
for entrusting your story with us today.
Thanks for listening to
this episode with Charlette.
As she mentioned a few
times throughout this interview,
(01:12:34):
her husband Vince was going
through quite an experience
of his own through this whole process.
And we interviewed him as
well and got his testimony,
which you can find linked in
the description down below.
Thanks again for listening,
and we'll catch you in the next episode.
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