How I Met and Married My Husband

I came to Croatia 31 and single…

This was not how I planned life. I wasn’t one to have big ambitions, I just wanted to be a wife and mom. Raise kids, serve Jesus…

I was serving Jesus, but I wasn’t married or raising kids.

But one thing I knew, God had a plan in it all for me, and I began to shift my focus on just being the best servant for Jesus I could be.

I invested a lot of time in reading and prayer, I also began writing a lot.

Blogging was just burgeoning, and while I wasn’t officially a blogger, I wrote blog-style posts and put them on forums.

There was so much inside of me at that time that seemed to just flow out of me.

2005 – Faye Pratney (Winkie Pratney’s wife) and I

Early 2006, I began hanging out with this guy who remembered me from way back in 2001 when I had visited Croatia for my sister’s wedding.

I didn’t remember him at all.

We just seemed to click. The only struggle was that my Croatian was still pretty poor and his English was even poorer.

We chatted as best we could….

And soon we went from hanging out in big groups, to hanging out in small groups, to going to coffee one-on-one.

I was so nervous because I had previously been in a very toxic relationship — I didn’t trust my taste in guys —

so I went to several people in the church privately to ask what they thought of him.

They all had glowing reports about him as a person.

He finally asked me to be his girlfriend on a hot and muggy July evening.

That winter I went back to the States to visit my parents and stayed for 2 months.

It wasn’t very long after I came back home that he asked me to be his wife, and by August we were married.

It’s crazy to think that in a few months, we’ll be celebrating 17 years of marriage.

There have been wonderful times and trying times – but God has been faithful.

He has kept us strong and stable, and I am so thankful for the man he brought into my life!